Tanuj Chopra

Biography:

Tanuj Chopra is an American director. His first feature film, Punching at the Sun (2006), was nominated for the Humanitas Prize and premiered at the Sundance Film Festival. He directed the second and third seasons of the Netflix online series Delhi Crime, the first of which was nominated for an International Emmy. Raised in Silicon Valley, Chopra graduated in 1999 with a Bachelor of Arts (BA) in Semiotics from Brown University. In 2007, he earned the FOCUS cinema Fellowship and the School of Art’s Dean Fellowship while pursuing a Master of Fine Arts degree in cinema at Columbia University School of the Arts.

In the summer of 1998, Chopra produced Hate Crime, his first student film. He wrote, directed, and produced Uljhan, a 10-minute short film that screened at festivals in New York and Los Angeles while he was a Brown University undergraduate. In 2003, he produced, edited, and directed Butterfly, a short romantic film starring Tillotama Shome that was shot in New Delhi and screened at more than 20 festivals in North America, Europe, India, and Pakistan. Butterfly received a Director’s Citation at the 2004 Black Maria Film and Video Festival, the Audience Choice Award at the 2003 Asian Film Expo in Lyon, France, and “Best Film” at the Napa Valley Wine Country Festival and the Ivy League Film Festival.