Kajri Akhtar

Kajri Akhtar is a South Asian producer, filmmaker, script developer, entrepreneur and the founder of Icchi The Cat Studios. She was born in New Delhi as an only child to her parents, who both had a reputable career. She was raised by a single mother as her parents separated at a very young age. Growing up, she had a fascination with images, design, lighting and different types of creative arts. She trained in theatre and classical dances. She always had a desire to capture and narrate to the world the stories of different people.

When she was 16 years old, her uncle gifted her with his second-hand camera, which was a crucial incident in cultivating her passion for cinematography. She started delving deep into photography and pursued cinematography after completing her grad school. She then moved to Mumbai at the age of 21, working as a camera assistant. She soon entered the Bollywood industry by working as an assistant for reputable Directors of Photography and continued as a cinematographer for four years. As she found the work environment extremely male-dominated, she felt that her creativity was getting wasted. So she opened her own production company, Icchi The Cat Studio, which produced ad campaigns, commercials, visual art and films.

Akhtar made content for top companies such as BMW, Google, Honda and Cadbury. She was the creative and executive producer for Urban Company, and one of her remarkable achievements is having shot a United Nations Development Program on women’s reproductive health and rights. Kajri also shot inside a nuclear power plant for National Geographic’s ‘Inside Series’, making her the first Indian woman to do so. She then moved to Los Angeles in 2019 and studied Production and Development at the University of California.

In LA, Kajri worked for companies such as Unlimited Possibilities Music & Talent(UPMT)— an African-American agency, River India, Huawei, Perfetti, etc. Some of the significant personalities she has worked with are: the filmmaker Spike Lee(on his film Chi-Raq), the cinematographer Larry Smith, and the filmmaker and producer Bharat Sikka(in his studio, Ransom Film). A well-known personal work of hers is the production of a documentary on Kamla Bhasin, who is a famous Indian feminist and social scientist. At present, Kajri is working for the production studio, ‘We The People’ as well as a freelance producer.