Ashish Ravinran is a Singaporean-Indian writer who tells subversive, multicultural stories that approach messy subjects with a light touch. He learned how to ask questions from his anthropologist mom and how to tell stories from his lawyer dad. He has a large, global family who come in multiple shades of brown and mysteriously end up as characters in his scripts. As an Indian kid attending Christian schools in Chinese-majority Singapore, Ashish developed an early interest in race, migration and cultural clashes. When he was stuck doing a 1984-esque desk job during two years of compulsory military service, he thankfully discovered writing and filmmaking as a more productive way to question authority.

Ashish began making short films as a history undergrad at Oxford University and received his MFA in Filmmaking from NYU Tisch. His thesis short dramatized the origin story of a real-life CIA sex tape that was made to depose the Indonesian president. While developing his writing, Ashish has also edited documentaries for Amazon, PBS, Hulu and ESPN, and has taught editing to both NYU grad students and Danny DeVito. In his spare time, he tries to re-create his dad’s chicken biryani recipe.