Sadia Shepard

Sadia Quraeshi Shepard is a Pakistani American filmmaker and author. She is the author of The Girl from Foreign: A Search for Shipwrecked Ancestors, Lost Loves, and a Sense of Home, which was published by the Penguin Press in 2008. She is the daughter of an American father, architect Richard Shepard, and a Pakistani American mother - artist, designer and educator, Samina Quraeshi. She received a BA from Wesleyan University, where she studied with Jeanine Basinger, an MA from Stanford University and was a Fulbright Scholar to India in 2001. Shepard's writing has appeared in The Washington Post, The New York Times, The Forward, Wall Street Journal magazine, and The Indian Express. She has taught in the undergraduate creative writing program at Columbia University. She received an MFA in creative writing at Hunter College. She is a Kundiman fellow and has received writing residencies from the Vermont Studio Center and Yaddo. She is an assistant professor of film studies at Wesleyan University. Through the Penguin Random House Speakers Bureau, she lectures widely on topics, such as the Jews of India, Growing up Interfaith, and Researching and Writing the Family Story.