Neha Shastry is an Indian American film director and producer whose work sits at the intersection of power, justice, and pop culture. Her films have earned an Emmy and a duPont Award — and made an outsized cultural footprint, from the biggest documentary debut in Netflix's history to the Academy Award shortlist.

Her feature documentary The Act of Dreaming (2026) follows three families, on three different continents, through the disorientation and hope of their first year in America. The film won the Boundary Breaker Award at the Buffalo International Film Festival (BIFF 2025) before premiering at the Asian American International Film Festival (AAIFF 2026), where it won Best Emerging Director and the Sikay Tang Critical Lens Award. The film is still on the festival circuit and being screened across the country.

Neha is currently directing an unannounced limited series for Netflix and a short documentary for Sandbox Films and The Guardian.

Her other directing credits include The Murdochs: Empire of Influence (2022), named one of the best TV shows of 2022 by The New Yorker, and two films for MGM+'s The Ruling Class (2023) — one on Betsy DeVos, the other on Peter Thiel. Her episode of Netflix's What's Next with Bill Gates (2024), which pushed the Microsoft founder into an uncomfortable reckoning with his own wealth, earned her an Emmy nomination and praise from The New York Times.

As a producer, Neha's credits include All In: The Fight for Democracy (2020), Academy Award shortlisted; Convergence (2022); and Harry & Meghan (2023), which had the biggest premiere-week debut of any documentary in Netflix history.

From 2021 to 2022, she was part of the inaugural class of Netflix's Nonfiction Directing Fellowship, an incubator for directors of color.

Neha started her career on the founding team at Vice News. Months into the job, she was producing the outlet's Emmy- and duPont Award-winning coverage of Russia's annexation of Crimea and the war in Eastern Ukraine. She later moved to CNN as a tech reporter and producer, where she developed her focus on power and the people who hold it. When journalism started to burn her out, she turned to filmmaking — and never looked back.

Neha is represented by CAA and by Michelle Chang at Ramo Law.