Pratibha Parmar
Title
Honorary Doctor
Person Type
Honorary
Award winning filmmaker and writer, Pratibha Parmar is internationally known for her vision centering marginal stories in bold creative ways. She is widely acknowledged for shaping feminist, queer, and diasporic visual cultures.
From experimental short films to documentaries and feature-length works, Parmar’s cinematic language operates as an act of visual justice - a strategic and creative term she coined to describe how art can be used to resist erasure, subvert harmful stereotypes, and build transnational networks of solidarity. Parmar’s pioneering film Khush was the first film to celebrate the stories and experiences of South Asian LGBTQ people. Parmar did her post graduate studies at the Centre for Contemporary Cultural Studies (Birmingham University). She is an author, co-author and editor of several trailblazing books and essays. Parmar has been a Visiting Artist at Stanford University and was Associate Professor at California College of the Arts, San Francisco. Her videos form part of the permanent collections at – MOMA (NYC), the Pompidou Centre (Paris) and have been exhibited at Whitworth Gallery and National Galleries Scotland. Two of her films were part of the landmark exhibition Women In Revolt at Tate Britain. Parmar has received the Frameline Film Festival’s lifetime achievement award in recognition of her major, lasting contribution to LGBTQ+ representation in media arts, the ICON Award for Outstanding Contribution to Indian and World Cinema and the 2022 Mind the Gap award from Mill Vallery Film Festival for contributing to closing the gender gap in film.