Shalini Kantayya is an American filmmaker and environmental activist based in Brooklyn, New York, whose films explore human rights at the intersection of water, food, and renewable energy.

[2] Kantayya finished in the top 10 out of 12,000 filmmakers on Fox’s On the Lot, a reality television talent show by Steven Spielberg, Mark Burnett and David Goffin.

[4] Set in the near future, A DROP OF LIFE is the story of two women, a village teacher in rural India and an African American corporate executive, whose disparate lives intersect when they are both confronted with lack of access to clean drinking water.

Catching the Sun premiered globally on Netflix on Earth Day 2016 with Executive Producer Leonardo DiCaprio,[12] and won the Best Feature award at the San Francisco Green Film Festival.

[16] It was directed by Kantayya and follows researchers and advocates, principally MIT computer scientist Joy Buolamwini, as they explore how algorithms encode and propagate bias.