The Department of Film and Media Studies is proud to welcome Assistant Professor Prashanth Kamalakanthan to UC Irvine's School of Humanities. Kamalakanthan comes to our department with a background in filmmaking, particularly in screenwriting, script development, directing, cinematography and editing. His pedagogical interests center around film aesthetics, genre theory, Indian and Asian American cinema, documentary studies, transmedia storytelling and the political economy of film and media. Along with our Director of Production and Screenwriting Studies, Desha Dauchan, and Lecturer Liz Cane, Kamalakanthan will teach courses within our production course series, sharing his knowledge with the next generation of filmmaker and scholars.
Prashanth Kamalakanthan was born in Tirupati, India, and raised in North Carolina. He has been named Filmmaker of the Year at Duke University, a Gotham Marcie Bloom Fellow in Film, and as one of the “25 New Faces of Film” by Filmmaker Magazine. Prashanth is the newest Assistant Professor of Film & Media Studies at the University of California, Irvine, and has taught previously at Brown University, Virginia Commonwealth University, and NYU’s Tisch Graduate Film. His award-winning short films have exhibited worldwide and are featured in The New York Times, Mother Jones, and The Nation. His debut feature, Have a Nice Life (2021), distributed by The Film Desk, was followed by New Strains (2023), which won a Tiger Award at the International Film Festival Rotterdam and is distributed by MEMORY; and Removal of the Eye (2024), Special Jury Award at New Orleans Film Festival.