Kiana Rawji is a Canadian director, writer, and producer based in Brooklyn, New York. She recently graduated summa cum laude from Harvard College with a joint concentration in Film and History & Literature. Through film, she strives to close distances between people while celebrating the differences among them. As a South Asian Muslim woman and daughter of East African immigrants, Kiana resists binary categorizations and easy answers, leaning into complexity while exploring stories of diaspora, identity, and human resilience. Her TEDx talks on Islam and the Cosmopolitan Ethic have reached over 150,000 people worldwide.

Kiana's 2021 documentary, LONG DISTANCE, about migrant workers at an Albertan meat plant, won the Grand Jury Prize for Best Alberta Short Film at the 2021 Calgary International Film Festival. Her 2023 documentary, MAMA OF MANYATTA—which screened at the 2023 Pan African Film Festival, Essence Film Festival & Zanzibar International Film Festival, with a Special Jury Mention—follows an extraordinary woman fighting HIV & gender-based-violence in a Kenyan slum. And her 2023 fiction film, INSIDE JOB, is about an Indian woman who suspects her African domestic workers of theft in 1970s Nairobi. It received the Harvard Film Department’s prize for most outstanding interdisciplinary project & premiered at the Chicago South Asian Film Festival. INSIDE JOB & MAMA OF MANYATTA have also screened at independent theatres in the US, Canada, and East Africa.