BIOGRAPHY



BIOGRAPHY

Sushma Joshi (born May 26, 1973) is a Nepali writer and filmmaker based in Kathmandu, Nepal.

The End of the World, her book of short stories, was long-listed for the Frank O'Connor International Short Story Award in 2009. Art Matters (2008), a book of essays about contemporary art, was supported by the Alliance Francaise De Katmandou.

Joshi contributed a widely read Sunday column The Global and the Local to Nepal's leading English daily newspaper The Kathmandu Post from 2008-2011. Inspired by Nepali history and contemporary politics, her non-fiction and reportage deal with issues of social change, environment and gender.

Sound of Silence (1997) her first documentary, was screened at the New Asian Currents at the Yamagata Documentary Film Festival. Water (2000) was screened on the Q and A with Riz Khan on CNN International, and the UN World Water Forum in Kyoto. The Escape (2006), a short about a teacher targeted by rebels, was accepted to the Berlinale Talent Campus. Her films have also screened at Flickerfest Film Festival, Sydney; Vancouver Nepali Film Festival; Himalayan Film Festival in London and others.

Education and Influences
Joshi was born and grew up in Kathmandu. From age 8 to 12, she studied in Dowhill School, Kurseong, in the district of Darjeeling. These formative years in a school started by British missionaries instilled a passion for literature and writing. She finished her education at Mahendra Bhawan and Siddhartha Vanasthali High School in Kathmandu.

Joshi graduated from Brown University in 1996 with a BA in international relations. At Brown, she studied liberal arts and took workshops in fiction, autobiography, and poetry. She also took classes in documentary production with artist Tony Cokes.

From 1999-2002, she was in graduate school at the New School of Social Research in New York, where she received an MA in anthropology. During the summers, she attended The Breadloaf School of English at Middlebury College, Vermont, and received another MA in English Literature in 2005. At Bread Loaf, she studied playwriting with Obie prize winning playwright Dare Clubb, as well as theatre directing and acting with Alan and Carol MacVey.

Joshi received a waiter fellowship to attend the Bread Loaf Writers' Conference in 2000. In 2005, she received a research and writing fellowship from the MacArthur Foundation. She was awarded a residency at the Bellagio Center, sponsored by the Rockefeller Foundation, in Bellagio, Italy, in 2006. Joshi was a featured writer at the Ubud Writers and Readers Festival in 2009. In 2011, she was an Asia fellow and traveled to Thailand and Burma to do research on a book about Nepali migrants, with support from the Asian Scholarship Foundation.

Joshi was a jury member of the Indigenous Film Festival in Nepal in 2009. She was also a member of a three-judge panel for the film competition on global warming sponsored by British Council/DFID in Kathmandu in 2010.

Art
In 2004, Joshi had a solo exhibit of her paintings at Gallery Nine. The exhibit featured 26 paintings depicting figurative paintings about the state of Nepal during the civil conflict.

Joshi's multimedia installation titled "Jumla: A cyberphoto installation" was accepted to the Eighth International Symposium of Electronic Art (ISEA) at the Art Institute of Chicago in 1997.

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