One-time advertising writer, Vani Subramanian has been a women's rights activist and documentary filmmaker since the nineties.

Her work as a filmmaker explores the connections between our everyday practices, perceptions and prejudices, and the larger political questions confronting us – be they in the areas of culture, food practices and production, education, sectarian intolerance, sex selective abortions, or questions relating to justice and the death penalty. Her films have been screened and received awards, both nationally and internationally.

Her most recent film, titled Cinema Pe Cinema: The Theatres. The movies. And Us creates a memoryscape of some people whose lives touch, or have been touched by single screen cinemas in India, and explores their complex and layered relationships with the theatres and others in the audience.

Over the years, she has extended her practice to video art in performance, as well as mixed media installations and pop-up digital art shows. The issues that move her to create these works reflect her varied interests and concerns: gender and space, neighbourhood histories and memory, as well as the punishment of death as experienced and spoken about by those on death row in India.

Vani has been visiting/guest faculty at School of Planning and Architecture, New Delhi, College of Arts, Architecture & Planning & the Department of Theatre, Film & Dance, Cornell University, NY, as well as Sushant School of Architecture, Gurgaon and Mahatma Gandhi Hindi University, Wardha.

Presently she is the Creative Director of reFrame Institute of Art and Expression, an initiative that produces, mentors and disseminates artistic efforts that respond to contemporary challenges.