Vishal Solanki holds a Bachelor of Fine Arts in Applied Art and honors in Film Directing and Cinematography from the Los Angeles Film School. For the last 12 years, he has been working as a full-time filmmaker in Los Angeles. His recent documentary feature Caffeinated premiered at the Santa Barbara International Film Festival in 2015 and subsequently released by Amazon Prime. Cora, a short drama he photographed, premiered at the 2016 Cannes Film Festival. Recent credits include cinematography for The Advocates which premieres at LA Film Festival 2018 followed by a theatrical release, cinematography for a documentary about child sex trafficking in America directed by PBS fellow Joanna Friedman, and cinematography for an online refugees’ archive called Stories of Syria. His cinematography work on Go Public, an award-winning documentary series, was featured on PBS, and he has done cinematography for PSAs of Sesame Street for HBO and PBS. Solanki is an associate of UC Berkeley’s IRP workshop; his scholarship was funded by the MacArthur Foundation and Knight Foundation. In 2018, he received a grant from Center for Cultural Innovation to attend the Getting Real 2018 conference organized by IDA. He is currently nominated to the FRONTLINE/Firelight fellowship for his investigative reporting documentary titled About Time. Solanki volunteers for the California Coalition for Women Prisoners and the International Documentary Association, and he is a guest speaker at the Dodge College of Art and Media at Chapman University for documentary production. In 2012, he started Evoke Mediaworks to empower communities through media.
