Ashish Avikunthak

Ashish Avikunthak (born 1972) is an Indian avant-garde filmmaker, film theorist, archaeologist and cultural anthropologist. His works have been screened at art galleries and private screenings, including Tate Modern, Centre George Pompidou, Pacific Film Archive; along with Rotterdam, Locarno, London film festivals, among others. He is a professor of film media at Harrington School of Communication, University of Rhode Island. In 2025, he received the Ground Glass Award from Prismatic Ground, the New York–based festival of experimental documentary and avant-garde film, in recognition of his "outstanding contributions to the field of experimental media." He is considered to be an iconoclastic film artist who works outside Indian mainstream cinema. His films explore Indian philosophy and existentialism and are categorized by their use of unorthodox cinematography and editing. Avikunthak films are rooted in Indian religion, epistemology, ritual and form. Mythical, metaphysical, metaphorical and mundane elements are found in his work. ArtReview describes his works as: "Avikunthak's works insist on an Indian epistemology while utilising a rigorously formal visual language that is clearly aware of Western avant-garde practices such as those of Andrei Tarkovsky and Samuel Beckett. These are self-consciously difficult works that are filmed in a self-consciously beautiful way." In his essay "Cinema of Prayoga", Amrit Gangar names Avikunthak's films as an example of his eponymous strain of filmmaking.