RAKHEE JETHWA

Rakhee Jethwa is an Award-winning producer and director.  She has developed and produced documentary and branded content across the globe for HBO Max, CNN, HULU, National Geographic, Red Bull, MTV and more.  Her work has taken her to Texas prisons, slums in Nairobi and Gujarat, the Amazon rainforest and many places in between.  She is most drawn to stories about the human spirit and what drives us, particularly within marginalized communities. Most recently she produced episodes for Take Out with Lisa Ling, United Shades of America with W. Kamau Bell and Taste the Nation with Padma Lakshmi. 

In the early 1970s, Rakhee’s family became refugees after they were expelled from Uganda by dictator Idi Amin.  It was in England that her parents rebuilt their lives and eventually moved to the Washington D.C. area, where Rakhee was born and raised.  Though her roots are Indian, her identity is a confluence of several cultures which has given her a unique lens from which to see and interact in the world. 

Rakhee recently directed and edited a short documentary called Ragpickers, about a group of women in India who collect and sell recyclable waste to support their families. She is currently based in Brooklyn, where she’s practicing her cooking skills and developing a project about her family’s volatile and unusual past. Her hope is that by using story as a tool to center minority and marginalized voices, we may reveal a fuller and more expansive picture of who we are.