Nasheed Qamar Faruqi

I am a writer, director and spinner of yarns. I am working on two feature films about the lives of ordinary women and girls with support from BBC Film and am writing my first book with Bloomsbury Publishing.

The first documentary I made – David Hawkins: A Battle of the Mind – was nominated for AHRC Research Film of the year in 2017. My feature film, People Are Strange, was selected for iFeatures 2018/2019. In 2021 I completed Re-Reading Fanon, an hour long documentary about the psychiatrist and philosopher Frantz Fanon that features Jean Khalfa, Robert J. C. Young, Achille Mbembe, Daniel Pick and Samia Khatun.

My work has played at festivals, museums and symposia internationally (from Cannes and London to Los Angeles) and been championed by South Asian festivals such as Tongues on Fire and NYIFF.

I combine filmmaking with teaching, advocacy and writing. I enjoy public speaking and have spoken at Newcastle University, the Cambridge Film Festival (2023), book launches and panel discussions. I serve on the board of the Cambridge Film Trust and the Directors’ Charitable Foundation.

I am a Clore Fellow, selected to be an Arts Council of England Fellow on the Clore Cultural Leadership Programme (2015/16). Educated at Wadham College, Oxford (where I read English)*, I’ve also completed an MFA in Directing from the Film Program at Columbia University in New York and an MA in Cultural Theory from Queen Mary in London (where I studied under Jacqueline Rose, Morag Shiach and others). At the beginning of my career I spent three formative years working, in production and development, for Merchant Ivory (the makers of Remains of the Day, Heat and Dust and Maurice); their support and my relationship with them has endured to this day. I have received awards from the Society of Authors’ Trust, the Film and TV Charity, Screen Skills, Columbia University and Bloomsbury Books.

* I started university in 1997, the last year British students could enter higher education without tuition fees and with a Local Authority Grant to cover living expenses.

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Find my work on: Vimeo | Youtube

Read my essay about “Black Narcissus” (Powell & Pressburger, 1947) for the BFI Cinema Unbound Season.

Read my essay for the launch of The Museum of Colour

Read my Clore/AHRC research on diversity in the UK cultural sector.

Member of Liberty, WGGB, Directors UK, Society of Authors and BAFTA Connect.

I am an ILM Level 7 accredited coach (I trained with RD1st) and have completed part one (Intelligence) in Organization and Relationship Systems Coaching.