Mridu Chandra
Director / Producer
Mridu Chandra is a BAFTA and Emmy nominated filmmaker and producer of award-winning documentaries and fiction films that cover topics of civil rights, environmental and racial justice, and gender equality. These films have premiered at Sundance, Telluride, and SXSW; aired on PBS, Disney+, and Netflix; and screened for members of the U.S. Congress and the United Nations. Recent films include producing BECOMING COUSTEAU (Disney+) directed by two-time Oscar nominee Liz Garbus and co-producing CURED (PBS) directed by Bennett Singer and Patrick Sammon. Her expertise as an archival media researcher and clearance specialist has additionally served numerous other documentaries (WHOSE STREETS?, BROTHER OUTSIDER: THE LIFE OF BAYARD RUSTIN), fiction films (STEVE JOBS directed by Danny Boyle) and Broadway productions (BETRAYAL directed by Mike Nichols). She has managed a film fund and distribution initiative to support the professional development and increased visibility of underrepresented filmmakers worldwide as the founding director of IF/Then Shorts at Tribeca Film Institute, a program now at Field of Vision. SAUND vs. COCHRAN marks her directorial debut.
ANIMATORS– Join us!
National Advisory Board
Members of the National Advisory Board for SAUND vs COCHRAN provide valuable insights and subject-matter expertise during the development, production, and post-production phases of the project.
Anthony S. Chen, PhD is Associate Professor of Sociology and Political Science at Northwestern University, where he is also a Faculty Fellow at the Institute for Policy Research. Chen is interested in the political development of public policy in the United States from the New Deal onward, and he has particular interests in civil rights, social policy, and business-government relations.
Amrit Deol, PhD teaches at California State University, Fresno. She completed her doctorate in Interdisciplinary Humanities at the University of California and her interests are in Anthropology, Asian American Studies, and Women’s Studies. She is co-founder of the Sikh American History Project, a nonprofit organization dedicated to unearthing, preserving, and promoting scholarship and deeper awareness of the Sikh American history as part of the American story.
Hardeep Dhillon, PhD is a postdoctoral fellow at the American Bar Foundation (2021-2023) and Assistant Professor of History at the University of Pennsylvania (2023-). She completed her doctorate in History with a secondary in Women, Gender, and Sexuality Studies (WGS) at Harvard University. Dhillon’s research focuses on the legal exclusion of Asian American communities in imperial and multiracial contexts. Her area of expertise centers on the history of family separation and reunification as it relates to South Asian American immigrants, their children, and families in the United States.
Katherine Landdeck, PhD is Associate Professor of History at Texas Woman’s University. She is the author of The Women with Silver Wings and is globally recognized for her expertise on the Women Airforce Service Pilots (WASP) of World War II, and served as a Emmy Award-winning contributing producer and historian on the documentary film Silver Wings, Flying Dreams.
Catherine Rymph, PhD is Professor of History at the University of Missouri since 2000. She is an affiliate of the Department of Women’s and Gender Studies and the Kinder Institute on Constitutional Democracy. She specializes in recent US history, especially policy history, and US women’s political history. She is the author of Women in the Republican Party: Feminism and Conservatism from Suffrage through the Rise of the New Right.
Nayan Shah, PhD is Professor of American Studies and Ethnicity and History at the University of Southern California. Shah is a historian with expertise in U.S. and Canadian history, gender and sexuality studies, legal and medical history, and Asian American Studies.
Seema Sohi, PhD is Associate Professor of Ethnic Studies and a faculty affiliate in the History Department at the University of Colorado Boulder. She is the author of Echoes of Mutiny: Race, Surveillance, and Indian Anticolonialism in North America and several articles about radical anticolonial politics of South Asian intellectuals and migrant workers based in North America during the early twentieth century.
