Kum-Kum Bhavnani

Consultant


um-Kum Bhavnani is the producer/director of a widely-successful film - The Shape of Water, highlighting women's struggles against development, patriarchy, and militarism - featuring activist Vandana Shiva and a voice-over written by Edwidge Danticat and performed by Susan Sarandon.

Kum-Kum was politically active in the UK, working on anti-racist and international issues, combined with feminist and trades union issues, from when she was 18 until she left the UK in 1991. Through that involvement Kum-Kum worked with television and radio production as well as street theatre. After the airing of Resist and Survive (February 1983: Channel 4), Kum-Kum was offered a contract to work in media. Giving this up, Kum-Kum has had a fairly successful academic career, receiving a Ph.D in sociology and publishing several books researching racism, feminism, women in prison and development studies.

Kum-Kum was the inaugural editor at Smith College for the new journal Meridians: Feminism, Race, Transnationalism. She was an international observer in the 1994 elections in South Africa and an invited participant at the World Conference Against Racism in Durban in 2001. Her background is in teaching, bringing film-makers to the University of California Santa Barbara, working with a range of media, as well as being knowledgeable about the Third World issues. Kum-Kum has received scholarly grants for her film as well as Ford and LEF foundations.


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All rights reserved, 2006.