Gingger Shankar

Gingger Shankar is a director, composer, producer, songwriter, and the only female double violinist in the world. As a Sundance and WIRED fellow and a speaker for TED, Davos, and the Cartier Women's Initiative championing girls' education and empowerment, she has worked with visionary women in media such as First Lady Michelle Obama, Ava DuVernay, Stacey Abrams, and more. She was the first Indian woman on the Sundance Artist board (with Rashida Jones and Mark Ruffalo), as well as the first Indian American composer invited to AMPAS/The Academy. She has worked with The Smashing Pumpkins, Aloe Blacc, Sheila E., Trent Reznor, Saul Williams, Peter Gabriel, Katy Perry, Mike Nichols and James Newton Howard. Credits include The Passion of the Christ, Charlie Wilson's War, The Radical Monarchs, Heartbeats (w/ Roc Nation), Brave Girl Rising starring Tessa Thompson, and, most recently, the 2021 Amazon series The Last Hour. In 2011, she was chosen as one of Filmmaker Magazine's '25 New Faces to Watch' and her multimedia project 'Himalaya Song' (on climate change) was named one of the '10 Best Music Films at Sundance' by Rolling Stone. In 2020, she created a voting rights album called And She Could Be Next (a companion album to the Ava DuVernay executive-produced PBS docuseries) with Aloe Blacc, Sheila E., Saul Williams, and many more. Currently, she is directing and producing a feature documentary about a resistance camp fighting the Line 3 pipeline, which began as a song called "Promises of Our Grandmothers" written with frequent collaborator Daniel French and featuring the voices of 100 women around the world. 'Promises' premiered at the 2021 Nobel Prize Summit and was a tribute to women on the frontlines of environmental movements around the world. She is currently developing a feature-length documentary and accompanying album called Nari, which will tell the unsung story of the women of the Shankar family, her grandmother and mother, two extraordinary artists who helped bring Indian music to the West in the 1970s with Ravi Shankar and George Harrison.