Grant Category:	Fulbright-Nehru Student Research Program
Field of Specialization:	Film-Making
Name:	Ms. Courtney Stephens
Official Address:	At-Large, California
Indian Host Institution:	Satyajit Ray Film & Television Institute, Kolkata, West Bengal
Duration of Grant & Start Date :	Duration: 9 months August 2011

Brief Bio:

Ms. Courtney Stephens is a Los Angeles-based filmmaker whose work is concerned with the private lives of women. She grew up in Northern California and attended UC Berkeley, where she studied medical anthropology and spent time abroad in New Delhi. After working at the New York-based magazine Cabinet, she moved to LA for graduate school at the American Film Institute. Her narrative short films including Equestrian Sexual Response, Life On Earth and others have shown at numerous festivals and the first was nominated for a student Oscar. She has assisted the directors Terrence Malick and Peter Bogdanovich. Her current project is a documentary on a famed Oakland rummage sale and the generations of women who run it, titled How About That? Ms. Stephens' Fulbright-Nehru research titled "A Woman's Guide to the Hooghly," will be an essay/fiction film which will be structured as a travel guide to West Bengal, based on the actual writings of 19th century female travelers – many of them British. Keeping intimate diaries of their explorations, these women focused their gaze on the private geography of female experience in equal measure to the physical world around them.