JURY Team 2022
Sanjay Sharma
Founder & CEO, Marginal MediaWorks, Inc.
Sanjay Sharma is the founder and CEO of Marginal MediaWorks. MARGINAL is a premium content studio focused on popular storytelling genres from outsider voices, across a variety of media & formats – film, television, animation, audio and Web3. In just three years the company has helped produce six feature films, sold its first TV series, begun active production in audio, and begun developing several animated series and Web3 crypto-native stories. The company has received numerous accolades for its first projects The Killing of Kenneth Chamberlain (HBO Max), Madres (Amazon), and The Obituary of Tunde Johnson (Hulu), including from The Gotham Awards, The Indie Spirit Awards, the NAACP Image Awards and the GLAAD Awards. MARGINAL’s next feature film, Cypher, stars the breakout recording artist Tierra Whack, and it recently wrapped Four Samosas, a South Asian American-rooted comedy shot entirely in LA’s “Little India.” The company sold its first series to Amazon in 2021, a LatinX hour long genre series called Hummingbird, and will soon announce its first efforts in animation and crypto-native story building.
Sharma has spent his career at the intersection of media and technology, and currently is an advisor or board member to a wide range of entertainment and technology companies including Mars Reel, Skybound Entertainment, EmoJam, D36, Knowable, Culture Genesis and HEIR, through his advisory and investment firm, Short Message Service. He is the Chairman of the Board of CAPE, the Coalition of Asian American & Pacific Islanders in Entertainment; a founding Board Member of Gold House, a leading collective of Asian American leaders in tech, the arts, activism, food, fashion and finance; has been an Adjunct Professor at USC’s Annenberg School of Journalism; and speaks widely, from Cannes to the United States Congress, on new and traditional media, with a particular emphasis on the importance of diversity and representation in the content industries.
Tara Roy
Tara Roy is a Director of Original Programming at STARZ/ Lionsgate, where she oversees the acquisition and creative development of original scripted television series. Prior to STARZ, she worked at Endeavor Content, overseeing series (Normal People, Nine Perfect Strangers) and scripted podcasts ( Blackout, Ghostwriter), and at AGBO, Joe and Anthony Russo’s television studio. Originally from India, Tara has lived in South Africa and the UK, and diverse, global storytelling is her priority. She is a 2020 alumni of the CAPE (Coalition of Asian Pacific Executives in Entertainment) Leaders Program and at STARZ, is a jury member of the STARZ #TakeTheLead director’s program, which is designed to create more directing opportunities for women and people. Tara is a published playwright and lives in Los Angeles with too many plants.
Tanuj Chopra
Tanuj Chopra is writer/director/producer and showrunner from Northern California with five feature films to his name. His first feature, PUNCHING AT THE SUN, about South Asian teenagers coming of age in post 9/11 Queens, premiered at Sundance and Tribeca in 2006. Tanuj's most recent feature STAYCATION won the Grand Jury prize at the 2018 LA Film Festival in the Muse section. Chopra was selected for the 2018 Sundance Episodic Lab, the Fox Global Filmmaker Initiative, and the Sony TV Directors Lab. Tanuj is a graduate of Columbia University’s MFA film program where he also teaches. He is currently showrunning/directing DELHI CRIME on Netflix.