Indira Mehta

Melinda Leanna Shankar is a Canadian actress who is popularly known for playing the role of Indira Mehta, in the YTV show, ‘How to be Indie.’ She was born on 18 February, 1992 in Ottawa, Ontario, Canada. Since childhood, she wanted to be an actress because her mother was an actress and her paternal grandfather also worked as a director in Guyana.

She started her career as a child artist. At a very young age she started featuring in various advertisements, such as the Procter & Gamble billboard in Los Angeles, U.S. Since she lived in Ottawa, her father sometimes had to drive her for five hours from Ottawa to Toronto so that she could appear for her auditions. Therefore, her family moved to Toronto in 2008 when she was offered a TV show. She is currently living in North York, Toronto, Canada.

Melinda made her debut as an actress in 2008 in a CTV Television Series called, ‘Degrassi: The Next Generation’ in which she played the role of a high school student and Sav's younger sister, Alli. Next year, she played the leading role of Indie Mehta for a YTV show called, ‘How to Be Indie,’ for which she won the Gemini Award for Best Performance in a Children's or Youth in 2011.

She also won the Canadian Screen Award in 2013 for the same TV Series. In 2010, Shankar played the character, Janie Gibb in a Disney Original TV Film called Harriet the Spy: Blog Wars. In the same year, she starred with Aidan Quinn Aidan Quinn is an American actor. He was born on 8 >> Read More... in a feature film called The Festival Click to look into! >> Read More... of Lights. Her father was the production manager of the movie for which she was also awarded the Best Actress award at the Ibiza Film Festival, Spain.

After that, Melinda appeared as Kaitlyn in a TV movie called Alive, released in 2013. In the same year, she also won the Best Performance in a Children's or Youth Program for her outstanding performance in the show, How to be Indie at the Canadian Screen Awards. Some of her other projects include Filth City, Blindsided, Christmas with a Prince, True Dating Stories, The Wedding Planners, Survival Smarts, Red String of Fate, Romance in the Wilds, and Christmas in the Wilds. She has also worked as a writer for a TV series, DM 4 Revenge.

She also co-hosted the ‘We Day’ event, Free the Children's first U.S. In 2020, Melinda won the Best Guess Actress award at the Indie Series Awards for her show True Dating Stories. Moreover, Melinda has been practicing martial arts for over fifteen years and has a black belt in Karate. She has also been training in pointe, ballet, and other types of dances since the age of three. In 2014, Shankar also launched a professional image styling agency called Miss Conception based in Toronto.