Subhashish Panigrahi is an award-winning documentary filmmaker whose films have won many international awards, grants and accolades. His films depict plural and complex societies about language, tech and media and are often used as language materials by native speakers. He has ten films and other media works to his credit. In 2017, he founded OpenSpeaks, a lab to help digital language activists build media and tech resources for low- and medium-resourced languages, earning the distinction of National Geographic Explorer. 2021 documentary MarginalizedAadhaar and the Interledger Foundation awarded him the prestigious Future⎮Money Grant, helping him make his maiden docu-fiction, Bringing Down a Mountain.

His films are deeply personal and political, capturing the narratives and worldviews of those whose stories and languages are portrayed in those films. His 2021 film Gyani Maiya portrays the story of an elder whose language—Kusunda—was at the brink of extinction; MarginalizedAadhaar (2021) dares to ask, “whose tech is it anyway that marginalises the ones that are already marginalised?”; Bringing Down a Mountain (2023) reimagines a future of inclusive digital payments; he volunteered his labour to make The Volunteer Archivists (2020), which portrays the monumental digital archive Odia Bibhaba; and in Nani Ma (2022), he brought to life the sing-song poems in Baleswari, a dialect of Odia that is rarely documented in audiovisual media.