Please give a brief background on yourself and your career.
I am an artist, designer, and filmmaker, and I graduated from Wellesley with a major in Media Arts and Sciences in 2004. I started off my career with various TV stations including WGBH in Boston and DoorDarshan in Ahmedabad, and then as a Producer / Editor at Fly Communications, a boutique-sized ad agency based in New York City. At Fly I worked on many high-profile accounts including Amazon.com, New York Jets, the French Culinary Institute, and various Condé Nast Publications.
Since then, I have started my own shop, Brand Bean LLC, and have expanded my portfolio into documentary films. The first feature length documentary that I have worked on, A JOURNEY OF A THOUSAND MILES: PEACEKEEPERS, is a film about an all-female team of UN Peacekeepers. The film premiered at the Toronto International Film Festival and since then has been to the Jio MAMI Mumbai Film Festival, DOC NYC Film Festival, African Diaspora International Film Festival, and is slated to go to the River Run Festival, the Minneapolis St. Paul International Film Festival, The Atlanta Film Festival, and the Sydney International Film Festival. The film focuses on Muslim women defying stereotypes by serving on mission for a year as UN Peacekeepers. I doubled up as Field Producer and Editor, and occasionally lent a hand on camera as well. My other on-going project is titled, HER WORDS: STORYTELLING WITH SARIS, which is a collaborative mixed media project with artist and activist Monica Jahan Bose. I am producing, directing, shooting and editing the film component which is an in-depth look at the lives of a dozen women on a remote island off of the Bay of Bengal, especially in light of climate change.
I was born and raised in Dhaka, Bangladesh and reside in Brooklyn, New York.
How has your career changed since you originally envisioned it at Wellesley? What other careers did you consider as a student?
At Wellesley, I started out as an Architecture major in conjunction with MIT. Meanwhile, after failing to cope at my job as a dishwasher in the Tower Court Dining Hall dealing with scalding hot water or as an assistant at the Science Library sharpening tiny pencils, I got a job leveraging my camera savvy as a videographer at the Knapp Media Center. And I never turned back. I started taking more and more classes in the Art Department: Design, Photography, Film, you name it! I was also taking Computer Science classes and decided to design my own major. Takis Metaxas, Judy Black, Jess Irish and Salem Mekuria were instrumental in guiding me.
How has Wellesley contributed to your career?
Wellesley has given me my voice, and the tools that I need to conduct myself in the world both personally and professionally. Unfortunately, the media world is still disproportionately male and I owe it to my Wellesley education that I have never felt intimidated or out of place.
What is a typical work day or work week like for you?
This is hard to say. I run a one-person company that works with boutique enterprises helping them out with branding/web etc. And I also work on documentary films, and corporate/commercial films. So any given day has a lot to do with the project at hand. I could be on location in an IDP camp in Port-au-Prince following UN Peacekeepers, or sitting in my home office crunching numbers for a marketing campaign for a neighborhood mom & pop bakery.
What piece of advice would you offer students looking to get into your area of interest and expertise?
My advice would be to keep at it. All experiences, good and bad, help you grow.
What do you wish you had known as a student?
You’ll never have the luxury to travel for learning like you do as a student. If I had to do it over, I would go somewhere my junior year, every summer, and every winter!
If you could come back and take one class at Wellesley what would it be?
Sculpture I.