About

Ankita Mukhopadhyay Kumar is an award-winning Indian journalist and documentary filmmaker based in California, working between San Francisco and Los Angeles. She founded Akiray Pictures to make character-driven documentaries grounded in her work as a reporter.

Her directorial debut, Far from Home, follows Samira Faizi, an Afghan refugee living in Delhi, and her family as they face the possibility of being stuck in India forever. Funded by the Pulitzer Center on Crisis Reporting and the American Institute of Afghanistan Studies, the film premiered at the Oscar-qualifying American Documentary and Animation Film Festival in Palm Springs in March 2024 and went on to more than eight festivals, including the Oscar-qualifying Tasveer Film Festival and SF DocFest. It was a finalist for NHK’s Japan Prize and runner-up for Best Short Documentary at the Chicago South Asian Film Festival. In 2025 the actor Naseeruddin Shah joined the film as executive producer.

As a journalist, Ankita has reported from Gujarat, West Bengal and Delhi as a field journalist for Deutsche Welle (DW), Germany’s international broadcaster; covered the automotive sector as a business journalist for The Economist Group in India; and worked at POLITICO, where she helped launch its new mobile app. Her reporting has been published in India and internationally, including in Outlook India and The Wire. She has received the Professional Excellence Award from the Association of Foreign Press Correspondents in the USA (AFPC-USA) and the President’s Award from the Society of Professional Journalists (SPJ), and reporting fellowships from National Geographic and the Pulitzer Center. She is a regional director of SPJ, the oldest journalism organization in the world.

In 2024 she taught a class on reporting in India at the University of California, Berkeley. She holds a master’s degree in journalism from Northwestern University’s Medill School of Journalism and a master’s in history and international relations from the London School of Economics, where her dissertation received a distinction. She graduated with high distinction from Lady Shri Ram College for Women in Delhi, which gave her its NK Mehta award for her contribution to the college.

Ankita now works as a cinematographer and director on film sets in Los Angeles while making her first feature documentary, Divinity 2.0, about young musicians reinventing Carnatic music. Away from the camera she studies Hindustani classical singing, opera, musical theatre and tabla.