Akshay Asthana(II)

A strong contemporary voice originally from Lucknow, and now based in Mumbai, Akshay recently saw his first release on DisneyPlus Hotstar Home Shanti, a series that he wrote with the Posham Pa team, a production house founded by Sameer Saxena, Biswapati Sarkar, Amit Golani, Nidhi Bisht, and team. Akshay started his journey as a documentary filmmaker in Kolkata and went on to work as a video editor for Prashant Kishore's Indian Political Action Committee (I-PAC) in the 2015 Bihar elections for Nitish Kumar. From here, he went on to participate in AIB's First Draft, a six-month residency screenwriting program, where he was mentored by award-winning filmmaker, Satyanshu Singh. Akshay has written for the Spotify Studios podcast Lifetime: Viswa Vikhyatha NTR and was part of an ideation room for Balaji Telefilms, where they worked to create a repository of ideas. Akshay is currently working on fine-tuning his feature script titled Kashi Kothi Ka Kul, which has been shortlisted among the top six entries at the SWA's Script Lab, 2022, and is making the most of the mentorship he is receiving from filmmakers like Vikramaditya Motwane, Abhishek Chaubey and more.