Anjali Monteiro


Anjali Monteiro is a documentary filmmaker, media educator and researcher who lives in Mumbai. She is currently Professor and Dean at the School of Media and Cultural Studies, Tata Institute of Social Sciences. Jointly with K.P. Jayasankar, she has made around thirty-five documentary films on various subjects.

Biography

Anjali Monteiro was born in Pune, Maharashtra. Her parents were Inocencio Gracias Monteiro, an army engineer and Sofia Cordeiro Monteiro, a school teacher, both from Goa. She completed her bachelor's degree in Psychology from Sophia College for Women, Bombay University in 1975 and her master's degree in Economics from Gokhale Institute of Politics and Economics, Pune University in 1977. She completed her Ph.D. in Sociology from Goa University and the Centre for the Study of Developing Societies, under the guidance of noted scholar Professor Ashis Nandy in 1994. She taught at the undergraduate level and then was involved in development communication work between 1979 and 1983 at the Xavier Institute of Communications, Mumbai. She married her colleague K.P. Jayasankar in 1989 and they have a daughter.

Teaching

Monteiro joined the Tata Institute of Social Sciences in 1983 and set up the Audio-Visual Unit, which is now the School of Media and Cultural Studies. Monteiro has been a visiting faculty at several media and design schools and Universities, in India and overseas, including University of California, Berkeley, University of Technology, Sydney, and Lahti Institute of Design, Finland, among others.

Research

Monteiro's doctoral work, entitled State, Subject and the Text: The Construction of Meaning in Television, supervised by Prof. Ashis Nandy, involved an ethnographic study of television audience reception in a working-class neighbourhood in Goa, in the late 1980s. She currently writes in the broad area of media and cultural studies, with focus on documentary film, censorship, critical theory and issues of media representation.

Filmography

YearTitleLength
2017A Delicate Weave62 minutes
2012Farooq vs The State25 minutes
2011So Heddan So Hoddan60 minutes
2009Do Din ka Mela 60 minutes
2007Our Family56 minutes
2005She Write55 minutes
2003Naata: The Bond45 minutes
2001Saacha 49 minutes
1997YCP 199743 minutes
1995Kahankar : Ahankar (Story Maker : Story Taker38 minutes
1994Identity: The Construction of Selfhood20 minutes
1993A Collective Exploration Of Ourselves, Our Bodies23 minutes
1992One Hundred Years Of Drought21 minutes
1991From the Diary of a Genetic Counsellor30 minutes

Selected publications