Description of Research Expertise

Areas of Expertise

Educational television
Applied filmmaking
Film and television production
Documentary filmmaking
Film, television and documentary history
Cinematic literacy
Media education
Television news production
Media technology
Digital cinematography
Online film and television education
Music production

Professional Biography

Amitanshu Das is an award-winning filmmaker and media educator. Brought up in London, Amitanshu began his career in India. He made his first documentary Lest We Forget for CENDIT (The Centre For The Development of Instructional Technology). The film depicted the trauma of Sikh victims of communal violence following Prime Minister Indira Gandhi’s assassination. He began his professional career as an educator at same time conducting CENDIT media training workshops for rural communities. Adapting methods derived from Brazilian educational philosopher Paolo Freire, (whom he was to later meet and film) these workshops demystified video technology and placed it the hands of traditionally socio-economically and technologically marginalized communities in India.

As an Educational Television Producer for India’s University Grants Commission, he produced and directed programs for national television network. His film Building With Mud won the National Award for Best Film at the Countrywide Classroom Festival. He was a producer for India’s ever first Pre-school Television Project and taught graduate video production courses for the Jamia Millia Islamia Mass Communication Research Centre, India’s leading media production and research center co-founded by the Canadian International Development Agency and the Government of India. He subsequently joined Times of India Television then produced and directed their first-ever primetime show The Economy Series for Doordarshan- Indian National Television.

Moving to New York in the early nineties, Amitanshu lectured on film technology and film history at the American Museum of the Moving Image. He briefly joined The Continental Film Group for whom he co-wrote and co-developed America…America a pilot for a dramatic series on South Asian immigrants.

Amitanshu joined the faculty of NYU’s film school- The Tisch School of the Arts and taught courses in television and video production, documentary Production, film producing. He also taught Electronic Newsgathering at NYU’s Department of Journalism and documentary and video production at Marymount Manhattan College. As Director of NYU’s Department of Film, Video and Broadcasting, he supervised one of the United States older film programs with over 2000 students each year.

He also developed and successfully taught one of the earliest “online” filmmaking courses for the Penn CLO doctoral program for work-based learning leaders. Students both in and out of United States were taught to write, film, edit and upload short movies to the Internet.

He has also spoken on new media, film and television at the 2009 Media Conference hosted by India’s Association of the Chambers of Commerce (ASSOCHAM), the Asian Academy of Film and Television and Corporate University Xchange’s 2011 Global Leadership Conference. Amitanshu is a Research Fellow at UPenn’s Center for Native American Studies and a Senior Fellow at Penn GSE.

Recent filmmaking credits include Freedom School for WHYYY PBS Philadelphia and A Safe Place To Play also for WHYY. The Prophecy, a short film on the Pennsylvania Lenape Native American community has been on continuous display at Philadelphia’s Museum of Anthropology and Archaeology since 2008.

In 2011 Freedom School won a 2011 Bronze Telly Award at the 32nd Annual Telly Awards.

Current Projects

He is co-developing a TV series on educational entrepreneurship, producing and directing a documentary on Mexican immigrants in Norristown, a television program on The Future’s of School Reform and developing a video training certificate program in collaboration with WHYY PBS Philadelphia.