Age: 45
Ethnicity: South Asian
Occupation and/or Company: Social Media Influencer
Years of experience: 13 years

Personal & professional philosophy:
I’m Foodiliciousmuslimmom, a food connoisseur and marketing professional who believes in the power of community. Through creative storytelling and strategic marketing, I strive to support my tribe, amplify local voices, and build spaces where we grow and thrive together.

Upcoming performances/project:
This Ramadan, I’m working with Ocean Spray. I enjoy working with them to showcase their values naturally, helping them connect meaningfully with diverse Canadian audiences. I love supporting brands that truly celebrate Canadian communities.

What is the highlight of your work?
I focus on authentic, culturally rooted storytelling that reflects real life, community, and connection. My content blends food, lifestyle, modest fashion, and everyday moments in a way that feels warm, relatable, and trustworthy. I enjoy working with brands.

Age: 54
Ethnicity: South Asian (Sindhi)
Occupation and/or Company: Director, Community Resources with the City of Toronto
Years of experience: More than 30 years in my career and more than five as an author.

Personal & professional philosophy:
My professional career over the years has been committed to empowerment through inclusion, community development and social justice. My personal life has focused on creating spaces for South Asian voices and arts and culture; encouraging literacy and a love of books; and promoting the power of storytelling.

Upcoming performances/ project:
Fly in the Chai – a delightful picture book romp featuring an adorable grandfather and granddaughter, a lively group of marketgoers and one very memorable fly – comes to market on March 24, 2026. The public book launch will be held on April 19 in Toronto.

What is the highlight of your work?
The story’s highlight is the humorous and epic “battle” between a grandfather and a tiny, persistent fly, over who loves chai more.

Future goals in publishing:
I am working on several ideas for new stories at the moment, and hopes to share more news about that in the near future.

Age: 27
Ethnicity: Indian Born Canadian
Occupation: Actor, Dance, Playwright, Creator
Company: Cold Open Productions
Years of experience: 10

Personal & professional philosophy:
Humour, Humanity, Humility.
Upcoming performances/ project: The Roof is Leaking ਛੱਤ ਚੋਂਦੀ ਹੈ, presented by Pleiades Theatre at Canadian Stage’s Berkeley Street Theatre Upstairs, May 2025; At the End of Kaliyuga at Toronto Fringe and Sawitri theatre, July 2025; and Temple of Desires at Toronto Fringe, July 2025.

What is the highlight of your work?
Co-writing The Roof is Leaking with my dear friend Davinder Malhi during the pandemic was a deeply empowering experience. Creating this piece gave us young artists a sense of purpose and agency when everything felt out of our control. Creating and performing At the End of Kaliyuga, at the Edinburgh Fringe Festival challenged me to find my voice as an artist.

Future goals: To lead my artistry with intuition, impulse and pure sparkling joy.
Project brief / teaser: The Roof is Leaking play is a love letter to South Asian mothers, exploring the quiet endurance and unspoken sacrifices of Punjabi/South Asian women that hold their families together. The characters in the story grapple with duty, love, the weight of tradition, and what it means to truly see your family.

Ethnicity: South Asian (Sikh)
Occupation and/or Company: Actor and Playwright
Years of experience: 18 years

Personal & professional philosophy:
Art is a form of public service. It opens the heart.

Upcoming performances/ project:
Acting in The Roof is Leaking, for Pleiades Theatre, playing at the Berkeley Street Upstairs Theatre from May 8 to May 18, 2025. The play is about a middle-class Punjabi family in Brampton, Ontario. When the father’s death brings this dysfunctional family to its knees, their mother attempts to divorce her dead husband to recapture her personal freedom.

What is the highlight of your work?
Writing my first play, The Orchard (After Chekhov). The play was a profoundly personal story based on my family’s history of fruit farming in the Okanagan Valley, BC in the 1970s. It premiered at the Shaw Festival, making me the first South Asian playwright produced in the festival’s 50-year history.

Future goals:
As an artist, to think on a larger scale, to think bigger, to pursue stories that are poetic and ambitious.

Age: 34
Ethnicity: Sri Lankan Tamil
Occupation and/or Company: Actor and filmmaker, RavinMurph Pictures
Years of experience: Five

Personal & professional philosophy:
“There is only one good, knowledge, and one evil, ignorance” – Socrates. I love learning and improving in every part of my life.

Upcoming performances/ project:
Two upcoming series called Disrepair (director) and LWBL (co-star)

What is the highlight of your work?
Filming in Kochi, India and seeing another country’s filmmaking style.

Future goals:
Film everywhere around the world.

Project brief/ teaser:
A Tippling Adventure, is an upcoming Bellfibe TV1 Newfoundland limited adventure period series starring Andrew Ravindran releasing at the end of 2024.

Age: 24
Ethnicity: South Asian
Occupation and/or Company: Filmmaker (Producer, Director, Writer)
Years of experience: Five

Personal & professional philosophy:
One of my influences is the spiritual leader of Ismaili Muslims, Aga Khan, who refers to “the cosmopolitan ethic.” This is “a true cosmopolitan [that] takes a step beyond mere tolerance” of others and seeks to appreciate, understand, and learn from difference. Through filmmaking, I’ve often been immersed in the lives of former strangers and something beautiful tends to come out of the intersection of our existences, whether it’s new insight or new friendship or both. I am continuously learning through the lens of my camera because it forces me to pay attention and learn from the people and the world around me. I hope that, through filmmaking, with a cosmopolitan ethic, my films will bring people closer together while celebrating their differences.

Upcoming performances/project:
I’m developing a few feature films at the moment: one about a Kenyan migrant caregiver, a coming-of-age film, and a documentary on Caregiving in the United States.

What is the highlight of your work?
I love every part of the process of making a film. But one of my (many) favorite parts is finally watching my film play on a big screen in front of an audience. It’s easy to become desensitized to your own material through the film production process. But when I watch my work with an audience, it’s like I’m watching my film through fresh eyes. Watching a movie is so deeply immersive and transports people to another world, almost like a dream. If dreams are just movies we make with our eyes closed, then filmmaking is the work of fashioning dreams we can see with our eyes open.

Future goals:
In the next few years, I hope to make my first feature film. Beyond that, I intend to continue making more movies, telling more stories, amplifying more voices, and touching more people. Through filmmaking, I want to speak to the unspoken and grapple with things that are unjust or uncomfortable to drive cultural change. Through filmmaking, I strive to embrace complexity and contradiction; to reckon with big truths and celebrate small triumphs; to expose injustice and imagine justice.

[See image gallery at artists.southasianpost.com]

Age: 30
Ethnicity: Indian South African
Occupation and/or Company: Creative Director, Set Designer, Artist Years of experience: Five

Personal & professional philosophy:
Growth is a constant journey. I love what I do. I pursue my aspirations with unwavering determination, never waiting for the perfect moment. Self-care and valuing myself are central to my philosophy, as I believe well-being is key to achieving excellence.I never forget my roots, recognizing that where I come from shapes who I am and guides me forward.

Upcoming performances/ project: Drift

What is the highlight of your work?
My art installation encourages viewers to experience an echo of their own existence in the artwork, prompting them to question what fades and changes in their lives and what endures forever. The installation becomes alive when people are in space.

Future goals:
To hone my skills as a designer and to continue to learn, grow and add value to the world through my art.

Project brief / teaser:
This Indian Summer Festival art installation is an immersive exploration of life’s profound paradoxes — growth and decay, permanence and transience, the everlasting and the ephemeral.
Let Drift guide you through a meditative exploration with a canopy of vibrant fabrics flowing through driftwood, suspended ethereally above. The fabric symbolises the indomitable spirit of life—its colour, its vibrancy—complemented by roots that grow, decay, and are ultimately shaped by the tides of experience. Lie back and reconnect with the deeper rhythms of life amidst the day-to-day rush.
Drift beckons you to question: In the cycle of growth and decay, what is truly gained, and what is lost?

[See image gallery at artists.southasianpost.com]

Age: 64
Ethnicity: South Asian
Occupation and/or Company: Spinning Reel Productions Inc
Years of experience: 6

Upcoming performances/ project:
We just completed our screening in Oakville on the 9th of June, we have more screenings in Perth Australia and London in the summer. We may have another screening in Toronto in the fall.

What is the highlight of your work?
Threads That Tie Us: An Oshwal Odyssey, is a passion project that I have been working on for the past 7 years. The film is a documentary about the community that I come from, a lesser-known community called the Halari Oshwals which has about 80,000 members from around the globe.

Future goals:
I am trying to develop a few projects that include a book that has been brewing in my head for the past 3 years.

Project brief/teaser:
Threads That Tie Us: A feature 85 min Documentary film about the Halari Oshwal Community
Synopsis:
This documentary explores history, culture, traditions, and faith, portraying the Halari Oshwals as a distinct tapestry of humanity. The film raises questions that resonate with universal themes. Will the threads that tie this community persevere amid geographical distances and age-old rules? Can they sustain their unity in places where the population is scarce?Threads That Tie Us is a love letter to a community, a visual symphony of the past, and a hope for generations yet to unfold.

Years of experience (acting):
Supinder has been acting for more than 12 years in the Canadian Film/ TV industry. Playing ‘Sandy Rai’ in the Emmy Award-winning GUIDESTONES earned her a Canadian Screen Award for ‘Best Female Performance (Drama).’ She has appeared in the TEXTUALITY (starring Eric McCormack), guest-starred on ABC’s THE GOOD DOCTOR and recurred on several series including THE EXPANSE (SyFy), PRIVATE EYES (Global), CRAWFORD (CBC), and THE BEAVERTON (Comedy Network).

Upcoming performances/ project (place to talk about Allegiance):
Supinder is starring in CBC’s new series Allegiance (currently streaming on the free CBC Gem streaming platform; as Sabrina Sohal, a rookie police officer in Surrey, British Columbia who is fighting to exonerate her politician father after he is accused of political corruption. Allegiance is a dramatic police procedural centered around a Sikh Punjabi family, starring a South Asian female lead and was shot and is set in Surrey.

Personal & professional philosophy:
Whatever it is that you’re doing, the people that surround you are always more important that the thing itself because anything worth accomplishing likely can’t be done alone. We often believe the mythology that our solo endeavors are so important that we can sometimes lose sight of having grace and compassion for our loved ones, or our colleagues, or even just a stranger standing in line in front of you.

What is the highlight of your work?
Acting in Sort Of for CBC was an unforgettable experience. Having built a career of working on Canadian sets, going to work on Sort Of instead felt like I was coming home. I took so many lessons away from that experience, the main one being how to take up space in an environment where I hadn’t felt safe or valued in the past and I brought those to the set of Allegiance and I’ll continue to take them along with me wherever I end up.

Future goals:
In 2019 I wrote a digital series for CBC Gem titled The 410. Since that project’s release I’ve been working towards the hour-long version and I look forward to going back into the process of writing and pitching that show. I’m also a new mom and am excited to have some time off to spend with my young son.

Photo credit: Courtesy of CBC/Lark Productions/Darko Sikman

[See image gallery at artists.southasianpost.com]

What is your personal and professional philosophy?
As you climb the ladder – in life and career and anywhere else – have one hand reaching for the next rung and one reaching back to pull someone else up.
Surround yourself with people who love you as you are but won’t let you settle for less than you can be.
It isn’t my business to judge my unique contribution to the world – it is just my job to contribute in my own unique way.

What upcoming performances or projects would you like to promote?
On August 3, Stray Gods: The Role-Playing Musical game from Summerfall Studios. Then we will be launching another TTRPG show called DesiQuest, the first premium role-playing game show with an entirely South Asian leading cast. And on the horizon is the original series The B Word by Sabrina Besla, a series about the lives of five South Asian American women and how they are brought together and ripped apart by the most unpredictable and explosive of them all. And my bestselling book, I Am Fun Size, and So Are YOU!: Thoughts from a Tiny Human On Living A Giant Life is available on Amazon, Audible, and Streamily.com.

What is the highlight of your work?
In the theater, it was the long-lived experience of Metamorphoses, a play that started in Chicago, then toured the country, and then went on to a wildly successful run on Broadway. In the gaming world, it was the release of Overwatch and the ongoing love I’ve shared with that community. And on television there have been many, but Ms Marvel was definitely one of the biggest highlights of the last few years, both onscreen and off.

What are your future goals?
Just to continue pushing the boundaries of what is possible – both in terms of what I can do as an actor and what I can do for the world. I want to continue doing work that helps people know they aren’t alone, and provides not just entertainment, but genuine help to those in need.

Please provide a project brief/teaser for your next project.
DesiQuest is an upcoming tabletop role playing game, and the first of its kind as a show set in a completely Indian inspired fantasy universe (created by Jasmine Bhullar) with an entirely South Asian leading cast. We’ll be releasing it this fall and can’t wait for audiences all around the world to see the universe we’ve created together!