Anjali Nayar is a Canadian-Indian filmmaker, former climate scientist, and founder of the TIMBY suite of environmental and human rights reporting tools.
[3][4][5][6] Silas profiles activists using smartphones to expose land grabbing and corruption in West Africa and was executive produced by Ed Zwick and Leonardo DiCaprio.
[7][8] Nayar's feature directorial debut, Gun Runners, premiered at Toronto's Hot Docs Canadian International Documentary Festival in May 2016[9] and was acquired by Netflix.
[12] Nayar founded TIMBY (This Is My Backyard), a suite of digital tools that helps activists report, verify and tell stories safely.
Executive producers for the project included Edward Zwick, Leonardo DiCaprio, Jenn Davisson, Neil Tabaznik and Robin During the making of Silas, Nayar worked with Liberian activists to create the TIMBY (This Is My Backyard) reporting tools, now deployed in 21 languages in 40 countries around the world.
[9] Though many films in the global south focus on social justice issues, Gun Runners moves away from this theme and intimately portrays contemporary Kenya through the eyes of two friends navigating their way through life.
[21][22] Just A Band (in production) follows the story of four twentysomethings in Nairobi, Kenya, who drop out of university to form an art collective, creating a counter narrative to the lives expected of them.
Just A Band contains a mishmash of post-modern cultural influences such as the work of Sun Ra, Kung Fu movies, and hip hop.
The film is supported by Sundance, Cinereach, the Ted Rogers Fund, the Hot Docs Blue Ice Group, Worldview, and the PUMA Catalyst Award.
[23][24][25][26][27] Nayar founded TIMBY (This is My Backyard) in 2012, which is a suite of digital tools developed to help teams tackle complex chronic problems with speed and security.
The TIMBY technology was designed and built from the ground-up in Liberia and Kenya, in conjunction with the award-winning Sustainable Development Institute and its founder, Goldman Environmental Prize winner, Silas Siakor.
In Liberia, the platform is helping communities and civil society organizations collect and disseminate evidence of company and government infractions from the frontlines of rural extractive projects.
[44][50] Nayar's other notable Nature stories include features on hunting for viruses, explosive lakes, and reports on education in the Global South.
Nayar repeated the concept of the blog, travelling across India in the lead-up to the Commonwealth Games in Delhi in 2011 and for the FIFA Women's World Cup in Germany in 2011 (which again, has been taken down).
Her contributions ranged from short documentaries for Reuters' show Africa Journal to wire news coverage for TV and print.
Nayar's thesis at Oxford assessed the use of remote sensing imagery to predict urbanization and malaria rates in African cities.
Before that, she was the valedictorian, an academic All-Canadian and received Governor General's Bronze Medal (1999) for her year at John Abbott College, in Sainte-Anne-de-Bellevue, Quebec.