Neha Shastry is an Indian-American filmmaker whose work focuses on the intersection of power, justice and pop culture. Her empathetic and immersive work has been recognized with a Dupont, Emmy and Peabody, amongst many other accolades.
When working on a film, Neha fully immerses herself in the story — stopping at nothing to elevate the voices of those who have trusted her. Over the past decade, she has made films about some of the most influential figures in our culture.
She’s interviewed Bill Gates, spent days living in a camp with former FARC combatants in Colombia, ridden on ATVs with environmental activists in West Virginia, and spent a year piecing together the family dynamics within the Murdoch dynasty.
Neha is currently directing and showrunning a series about asylum seekers and refugees in New York with Ark Media. The series is all verite, and follows four families from different corners of the world as they navigate their first year in the United States.
In 2023, she directed an episode about the wealth gap for Netflix’s What’s Next (2024), a series about Bill Gates confronting some of the world’s most pressing existential issues.
Her other directing credits include the series The Murdochs: Empire of Influence (2022) which was named one of the best documentaries of 2022 by The New Yorker. After that, she made two films for the MGM+ series The Ruling Class (2023), one examining Betsy Devos, and the other, Peter Thiel.
She produced All In: The Fight for Democracy, (2020) a film about the history and legacy of voter suppression in the U.S, through the lens of Stacey Abrams’ work. The film was shortlisted for an Academy Award, and was awarded best documentary by The Hollywood Critics Association, The AAFCA and The Alliance of Women Film Journalists. She also produced Convergence (2022) for Netflix, which was nominated for an Emmy. She produced Harry & Meghan (2023), which is one of the most watched documentary series on Netflix.
From 2021-2022, Neha was selected to participate in Netflix’s inaugural Nonfiction Directing Fellowship, which was an incubator for upcoming directors of color.
She started her career at Vice News, and was part of the founding team of who built the brand into the juggernaut it became. Just a few months into the job, Neha found herself producing their critically acclaimed coverage about Russia's annexation of Crimea and the subsequent war in Eastern Ukraine. She later became a tech reporter and producer for CNN, where she gained her appetite on reporting about people in power. Eventually, she started to feel burnt out from the world of journalism, so she set her sights on filmmaking, and has never looked back.
Neha is represented by CAA and by Michelle Chang at Ramo Law.