Pro
Profile Complete
Pro
Profile Complete
Director/ screenwriter. Every morning I wake up at 6AM to watch a film with breakfast because storytelling is the only place that feels like home.
Anjini Taneja Azhar is a director and screenwriter based in Los Angeles. She fell down the world of cinema like Alice did the rabbit hole. Aimlessly searching for a passion as a child, she often found herself coming up short. All she knew was that spending hours in front of her parents' clunky dinosaur of a desktop computer with MS Word 2007 open, typing up stories and creating characters, felt like a warm blanket around her shoulders. On whim, she began acting in 2011 after a talent agent in Los Angeles scouted her. From there she booked principal and lead roles in features such as JJ Abrams' Star Trek Into Darkness, as well as TV such as Ryan Murphy's The New Normal and HBO's The Brink. Surrounded by visionary directing, bustling writers, and a labyrinth of light, Anjini immediately realized her hideaway in front of a blank page back home had a greater purpose in her life through cinema. She dove into her newfound love quickly, workshopping her craft as a director and screenwriter. Since 2015, she has been writing, directing, and producing. She's written and directed multiple award-winning shorts, co-produced for Fortune 500 companies, and even co-written a feature for a prominent producer at CAA. Anjini has been featured for her work in Forbes, Women Cinemakers Biennale Edition, and Ladygunn Magazine.
Anjini's most recent narrative short, 'EVERYWHERE YOU GO,' received its world premiere in-competition at the Oscar-qualifying LA Short's Int'l Festival and will screen in-competition at Newport Beach Film Festival. Anjini’s upcoming narrative short, "Who Are You, Nanu?' set to shoot in India in 2024, is a WritersxWriters Finalist and Hollyshorts Screenplay Competition 2nd Place Winner. She is a Golden Script Finalist and PAGE Awards Semifinalist.
Every morning, Anjini wakes up at 6AM to watch a film or read a screenplay with breakfast. If she misses a morning, she stays up late to get one film or script read in. It has been at least two years since Anjini has gone a single day without watching a film or reading a screenplay. She holds a deep reverence for cinema, only feeling a true sense of ‘home’ writing movies, watching movies, or making movies.