Terrie Samundra is a Director & Screenwriter who grew up between a rural village in India, a small farming town in Missouri, and along the coast of California; informing her work as a multi-cultural storyteller. Her debut feature, KAALI KHUHI, a Netflix Original Film, premiered on the platform in 2020. She is a current directing fellow of ReFrame Rise: a partnership between the Sundance Institute and Women in Film. 

Samundra has written and directed many short films which have all played to strong festival runs and screened internationally, including KUNJO, which garnered many accolades and was a recipient of a National Geographic Grant and a Princess Grace Award. With KUNJO, Samundra fulfilled one of her life’s goals by making a collaborative film in the village she was raised in Punjab, India. Her most recent short, EXTINCTION STORY ORIGIN STORY, premiered at New York’s Anthology Film Archive in the Spring of 2024. Samundra directed music videos for the iconic Drag City Records and a national commercial campaign for Planned Parenthood.

Samundra is a Sundance Institute Screenwriter's Lab alumna, a SFFILM Rainin Screenwriting fellow, a Princess Grace Awardee and an alumna of Ryan Murphy’s Half Initiative. She recently wrapped the writer’s room for an undisclosed Netflix series and is currently in development with Suitable Pictures for her original series THE BALLAD OF POOJA. She has written extensively with her creative partner David Walter Lech on both original work and adaptations.

Samundra is the daughter of Punjabi author and poet, Shashi Samundra. She is a professor at the American Film Institute, an active member of the Writer’s Guild of America and is represented by the Gersh Agency and Circle of Confusion.