Sonia Desai Rayka

Sonia Desai Rayka (she/her) is a documentary filmmaker and cultural worker whose body of work explores political resilience and quiet beauty found in everyday life. She currently works as an Associate Producer for DOC NYC's annual PRO conference; previously, she worked as an Associate Producer at Multitude Films (LIFE AFTER, 2025) and recently contributed as an Archival Researcher on DIRTY POP (TIME Studios, 2024) and THE TURNAROUND (Breakwater Studios, 2024). She was a documentary and children shorts programmer at the 2024 Nantucket Film Festival, and works with No Evil Eye Cinema as a virtual teaching facilitator. Before working in film, her career experience included years in childcare support, education, and immigrant rights advocacy. Her documentary short "Ohio is in the Heart" was commissioned by Asian American Documentary Network and played at CAAMFest and New Orleans Film Festival. Her work has been supported by Next Doc, Blackstar Projects, A-Doc, among others. As a director, Sonia's gaze is set firmly on collaborative storytelling that interrogates the embodied consequences of borders and how despite threats to our worlds, joy persists. Based in Brooklyn by way of Ohio, Sonia is the granddaughter of Raghunath and Dhanaben.

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ABOUT Untitled Camera Workshop Project

As a group of children navigate the uncertainty of their family’s asylum case, they take photo walks across New York to document the homes they've built in a city growing increasingly more hostile toward them.