Tenzing Sonam

His father, Lhamo Tsering [fr], who was born in the Kumbum area of Amdo (Chinese: Qinghai Province), served as Chief of Operations for the Tibetan resistance movement from the late 50s until the early 70s, and later, as a Minister in the Dalai Lama’s government-in-exile.

After graduating from Berkeley, he worked for four years as Programming Director at the Meridian Trust in London, along with his partner Ritu Sarin.

A portrait of maverick Bay Area artist Mark Pauline, the film won Third Place at the 1984 Student Emmys.

His writings have been published in the Penguin Book of Modern Tibetan Essays, Civil Lines, The Hindu, Time magazine, and Himal Southasian.

[1] Sonam and Sarin started the Dharamshala International Film Festival in 2012, with the aim of bringing independent cinema to the Himalayan region, encouraging local filmmaking talent, and creating a meaningful cultural platform to engage the area’s diverse communities.

The festival typically screens 26 contemporary features — narratives and documentaries and short, animation and experimental films over 3-4 days in early November in McLeod Ganj.

Sonam and Sarin organised the first-ever Tibet Film Festival in London in March 1992 in collaboration with the Institute for Contemporary Art (ICA).

And in March 2000, they organised Tibet 2000: Survival of the Spirit, a ten-day festival of Tibet at the India International Centre in New Delhi, which included film screenings, photographic exhibitions, the creation of a sand mandala, performances by the Tibetan Institute of Performing Arts, seminars and panel discussions by well-known writers and scholars, and a public talk by the Dalai Lama.