Biography

Director, screenwriter, and photographer Sooni Taraporevala's most recent work is a nine-episode series for Amazon Prime. She served as the creator, director, showrunner, co-producer, and co-writer. "WAACK GIRLS" will release worldwide in 2024.

In 2020, she wrote and directed "YEH BALLET", starring Julian Sands. Commissioned by Netflix to be a leading piece on its direct-to-digital feature slate, it was critically acclaimed and also noticed and lauded by Reed Hastings and Salman Rushdie.

Her directorial debut, "LITTLE ZIZOU", won the National Award from the Indian government as well as ten other international awards.

Her first screenplay, "SALAAM BOMBAY!", began her long association with award-winning director-producer Mira Nair. The film was nominated for an Academy Award, won more than twenty-five awards worldwide, and earned Taraporevala the Lillian Gish Award from Women in Film, Los Angeles.

Her second screenplay, "MISSISSIPPI MASALA", also for Mira Nair, was made into a film starring Denzel Washington for which Taraporevala won the Osella Award for Best Screenplay at the Venice Film Festival. In 2022, the film was restored and had a theatrical release in America.

She also wrote "THE NAMESAKE", based on the book by Jhumpa Lahiri, "SUCH A LONG JOURNEY", based on the book by Rohinton Mistry, which won her a Genie nomination from the Academy of Canadian Cinema & Television, "MY OWN COUNTRY", based on the book by Dr. Abraham Verghese, and "DR. BABASAHEB AMBEDKAR", a biopic based on historical research.

Born and schooled in Bombay, India, she received a scholarship to attend Harvard University, where she studied English Literature, Film, and Photography and met Mira Nair, who was her classmate. She received her BA from Harvard and her MA in Cinema Studies from New York University.

She is the author of a seminal photography book about her community, "PARSIS: A PHOTOGRAPHIC JOURNEY", which is now out of print and has become a collector's item. Her company, Good Books, published the first edition in 2000; a second edition was co-published with Overlook Press, NY in 2004. Her second photography book, "HOME IN THE CITY, BOMBAY 1977-MUMBAI 2017", was published by Harper Collins in 2017 with forewords by Salman Rushdie and Pico Iyer. A second edition is going into press now.

She has had several solo shows of her photographs in Mumbai and Delhi and been part of group shows including at the Tate Modern and Photographer's Gallery in London, The Met in New York, and the Musee de Quai Branly in Paris. Her photographs are in collections and museums worldwide including the National Gallery of Modern Art in Delhi and the Metropolitan Museum of Art, New York.

She has been a member of the Writers Guild of America since 1988. She was conferred the Padma Shri, one of the highest civilian honours in the country, by the President of India in 2014. In 2017, she was invited to join the Academy of Motion Picture Arts and Sciences.
- IMDb mini biography by: Sooni Taraporevala