Anitha Balachandran is a filmmaker, researcher and illustration artist. Her experimental short films and installations chronicle real lives and events, drawing on oral testimonies, spoken voice, poetry and song. They often combine drawing in ink, pencil, charcoal and sand, with stop-motion and digital compositing. Anitha studied animation at NID Ahmedabad and completed her MA with an INLAKS Foundation scholarship at the Royal College of Art, London. She is currently a PhD candidate at the Arts University Bournemouth affiliated to the University of the Arts, London.

Anitha’s animated shorts such as Pudavai (2000) and Baad Ki Raat (2008) have been screened internationally, including at Annecy, Zagreb, Estonia, Frankfurt, Seoul and Vienna, winning special mentions at Animafest Zagreb, the Vatavaran festival New Delhi, and the audience award at Frankfurt. More recently, her moving image installations have been exhibited by galleries in Vienna, Prague, New Delhi, London, Basel and Bangalore. Anitha has also worked on a few permanent commissions for historical sites in India. These include a film on Gandhi’s assassination He Ram (2006) housed at the Eternal Gandhi Exhibition at the Gandhi Memorial Museum in New Delhi, and Reis Magos: History’s Witness, a film for one of the oldest Portuguese forts in Goa. She has also worked on projects for institutions such as USAID, INTACH (Indian National Trust for Art and Heritage), DUAC (Delhi Urban Arts Commission), the Sanskriti Museums and UNESCO-MGIEP, among others. Anitha was a Pro-Helvetia artist-in-residence in 2013 and was awarded an IFA Arts Practice grant a few years later. She has also been the recipient of grants from AEF-ASIFA (the Association Internationale du Film d’Animation), the Hamlyn Foundation and the Society of Animation Studies.

Anitha illustrates and occasionally writes picture books. Her publishers include Random House, Scholastic, Kane Miller, Zubaan, Speaking Tiger, the Aga Khan Development Network for the Archaeological Survey of India, and the Friedrich Ebert Stiftung. Mister Jeejeebhoy and the Birds (Young Zubaan, 2008) has been successfully adapted as a play by the Gilo Repertory in Mumbai.

Anitha’s research engages with questions of visual culture, media history, and the intersections of image-making and animation film in postcolonial and transcultural contexts. Anitha’s writing has been published in Animation Practice, Process & Production; Animation Studies 2.0, Imago: Studi di cinema e media; the Journal of Illustration, and The Bloomsbury Encyclopedia of Animation Studies, among others. With Timothy Jones she is the co-editor of India Animated: Essays in Contemporary Practice (Palgrave Macmillan, 2026), and is a manuscript reviewer for Intellect’s Journal of Illustration. Anitha is a member of IAWRT India, a chapter of the International Association of Women in Radio and Television, and was on the 2023–24 Board of Trustees. At SMI she teaches studios in the theory and practice of animation to both undergraduates and postgraduates, and mentors MA Animation capstone projects.