Biography
Akansha Khanna is a graduate in Mass Media and Communications from the prestigious Indraprashta College, Delhi. Her father is an officer in the Indian Navy having won the Nau Sena medal for gallantry, in his endeavors at the Antarctica. Her mother has encouraged her to follow her heart and her younger brother keeps her going on...
She started as a production assistant in 1999. Her love for meeting and working with new people always helped her grow and quench her knowledge for the Art of Film Making. Akansha began her foray into film as an intern with 'The Times of India' in 2000, a leading newspaper in India. This experience helped her to create a show for television in which she interviewed leading politicians with a perspective vis-a-vis the X generation.
She later found the challenges of advertising tough to resist and went into joining Lowe Lintas and Partners, where she worked in the client servicing department on some leading brands like Woodland, Idea Cellular, Dabur, Gold Souk, Chambal Fertilizers and HFCL Connect.
This naturally led her to join advertising in a more hands on fashion as a production manager, learning the craft from ground up. As a production manager, Akansha worked on commercials and music videos with a leading production house. Producing was not far behind, and Akansha began to produce commercials for products like Apollo Tyres, Dabur Vatika, Horlicks, Robin Blue and Woodland, just to name a few.
By now, Akansha was in the in the middle of activity and experimented with short films. She directed a 30 minute docu-drama on Journalism called "Khachaak" and then also directed a 5 minute short film titled 'When the lights come off'. Both the films were nominated at the "First Frame' film festival, in Delhi. Having tasted initial success, Akansha needed to move to the film capital of India, Bombay, which led her to join Sony Entertainment Television.
At Sony, she joined the department in charge of programming. There she worked of huge television shows like Indian Idol, Miss India, Film Fare, Gladrags and CRY Telethon. Akansha, now that had experienced working with a leading TV channel in the country longed for international exposure leading her to join 'Fremantle Media Entertainment Television' where she worked as projects coordinator. Her restlessness led her to then seek newer arenas. She longed for greater challenges and joined in with a leading production house, Optimystix, where she head the advertising films division.
She co-founded a production house called Black Motion Pictures with her cinematographer partner Faroukh Mistry. And also a complete marketing/events/creative communication solution company called "eQ" with her partner Vikrant Nath.
She then moved on to working with Geon Studios Pvt Ltd, Barrie Osborne's company (The Academy Award Winning Producer of Matrix & Lord of the Rings). Co-founded by Michael Peyser, Jon Labrie, Madhu Sudhanan and Seemanto Roy.
In 2009, out of necessity to do something for herself, she started her independent boutique production house called "Silver Grain Productions". She started this off with producing a 6 days a week daily Marathi fiction drama series called "Tu Bhetshi Navyane" which went on for 300 episodes to be followed by another finite drama series of 250 episodes of "Runujhunu". Producing for feature films wasn't behind with the release of her first film "Sixteen" in 2012 as an Associate Producer and also the line producer of the film. Television Commercials, Virals, Large scale events in India (Sushmita Sen's I Am She, Indian Telly Awards, The Police Show, EVC, Illayaraaja's 60,000 plus audience show in Madurai) and the World (KL-Malaysia - King of Kings Show - Illayaraaja). She has been working in developing various feature films since then : Rum Pum Posh, Mahesh Bhatt's - Ab Raat Guzarnewaali Hai and being the Associate Producer and the Line Producer of the Oscar nominated and two time national award winning director, Ashvin Kumar's Noor. She worked on short films with reputed International directors like A night at Club Zenos and Heat in 2019 and 2020. In the web series domain, she produced a Netflix series called "Feels like Ishq" and a Sony Liv series "Haha Badle Hassu" was also produced by her. In 2020, She started working on her feature film Borivali Ka Bruce Lee which is looking at a release in 2023.
