Hima B.

Bio: Hima B.

Hima B. is a South Asian independent writer/director/producer who makes social issue documentaries, narratives, experimental films and videos that explore the intersections of race, gender, sexual orientation, labor, & economics, especially as they impact LGBTQ people and women/girls.

She works within the non-fiction, fiction, & experimental genres to push the boundaries of form and content by exploring creative ways of telling stories.  She hopes to challenge audiences with new information by using personal narratives to generate greater awareness around social issues and use the media’s potential for education, artistic innovation, & social change.

Hima B.’s interest in documentary filmmaking began in the early 1990’s as she experimented with channeling her political activism with her desire to use media as an educational and artistic tool to address social justice issues.  Her 1st documentary, STRAIGHT FOR THE MONEY: INTERVIEWS WITH QUEER SEX WORKERS (1994), premiered at the 1994 San Francisco Int’l. Lesbian & Gay Film Festival, the 1994 Whitney Museum’s series From India to America: New Directions in Indian American Film & Video, the 1995 Whitney Biennial, & continues to screen nationally and globally.  In 1995, she co-directed a short narrative with Eliza Barrios entitled LICK, about a jilted lesbian who takes revenge on her X through her fantasy world.  In 1996, she directed the documentary COMING OUT, COMING HOME for San Francisco’s Asian/Pacific Islander (API) chapter of Parents and Friends of Lesbians and Gays (PFLAG), which featured four Asian families as they discussed their personal journeys of coming to terms with their adult gay & lesbian children’s sexualities.  In 2003, she produced ent-homo-philia, a short, dark experimental video that “queers Kafka” and plays on the metaphor of internalized homophobia.  Parallels between insect behavior and the main character’s mating ritual are made as a beetle-woman unsuspectingly participates in her mate’s metamorphosis.  In 2008, Hima B. played Hillary Ride’m Clitoris in a satirical short entitled JIHAD FOR DEMOCRACY, about the bid for the democratic nomination between herself and Barack Hussein Yomama.  In 2008, Hima produced a series of non-fictional video profiles of ten African American and Latina women who are HIV+.  The collection will launch SISTAHS SURVIVE & THRIVE, an interactive living HIV/AIDS quilt which features media by and about women and girls who are infected, impacted, and at risk for the virus.

Hima B. was born in India, raised in the US, & earned her MFA from Mills College (Oakland, CA).  As the Education Director at MIX NYC, she coordinates “A Different Take,” a video production workshop for LGBTQ youth & adults who are trained in all aspects of video production as they create their own videos.

Hima B. has received funding for her videos and films from the Mid Atlantic Arts Foundation, Funding Exchange/Paul Robeson Fund for Independent Media, Astraea National Lesbian Foundation for Justice, the New York Foundation of the Arts, Open Meadows, the Brooklyn Arts Council, & the Horizons Foundation.

Hima B. is currently in production on various documentary projects that address women, girls, & gay men on the themes of HIV/AIDS, sex work,  & domestic violence.