User:Vsawhney/Pia Sawhney

Pia is an award-winning independent producer and director, and has collaborated on productions for PBS/Frontline, PBS/American Experience, HBO and MTV Networks. Her multimedia and audio projects have been published to the Los Angeles Times, aired on Radio Free Europe and Voice of America, and heard locally in Somalia and Afghanistan.

Pia completed a feature-length independent documentary in 2006 that dealt with Muslim immigrants selectively detained and deported by US immigration authorities after 9/11. The 66-minute version of the film, OUT OF STATUS, was nominated for Amnesty’s DOEN Award for Human Rights during the film’s premiere in Rotterdam. Through 2006 OUT OF STATUS screened in festivals worldwide, and was broadcast in Europe, airing first on Channel 4 Television in the UK and then on the History Channel in Spain. The film was reviewed by The New York Times, TV Guide, Variety, and New York Post and had a theatrical run in New York’s Lower East Side in August 2007.

Her film Rwanda: Take Two (2010) is part of the Forget Africa programme.