Parida Tantiwasadakran is an award-winning Thai-American writer-director whose films have premiered at multiple festivals around the world, including Slamdance, Short Shorts & Asia, and the Chicago Children’s International Film Festival. Her UCLA thesis film Young People, Old People & Nothing in Between won Best Live Action Short at deadCenter Film Festival where it became Oscar-Qualified for the 2024 Academy Awards, Best Performance at the Vancouver International Women in Film Festival, Best Short Film for Children at interFilm KUKI Berlin, Special Jury Mention at the Busan International Children’s Film Festival, The Excellence in Narrative Short Filmmaking Jury Award at The Asian American International Film Festival, and was nominated for Best Short at the Hawai‘i International Film Festival. The film premiered on NOWNESS, was distributed in Japan and Taiwan, and featured on RogerEbert.com.
As a sound mixer, Parida worked on Sierra Falconer’s debut Sunfish (& Other Stories on Green Lake), which premiered at the 2025 Sundance Film Festival. She has worked with talent such as Rebel Wilson, Anna Camp, Patrick Schwarzenegger, Jennifer Hudson, and John Goodman. Her commercial clients include Whole Foods, GQ, COMPLEX, BuzzFeed, Univision, and We Folk Ltd., while her narrative and documentary work has been featured at Comic-Con, Apple TV, and The Palm Springs International ShortFest, among other festivals.
Before making films, Parida worked as a graphic designer and game writer in Bangkok. She majored in Poetry and Creative Writing at Columbia University, where her poems and creative nonfiction pieces were published in Quarto, the school’s literary magazine, which has featured the work of J.D. Salinger, Jack Kerouac, Louise Glück, and William Carlos Williams throughout its history.
Parida is the recipient of The Adrienne Shelly Foundation Award (past recipients include Chloé Zhao, Dee Rees, and Ana Lily Amirpour), the UCLA Graduate Council Diversity Fellowship, the Carl David LGBTQ Memorial Fellowship, the Foreign Language and Area Studies Fellowship bestowed by the U.S. Department of Education, and is a two-time recipient of the Herman Kass Prize in Motion Picture Production, all of which reflect her commitment to diversity and her belief in uplifting underrepresented filmmakers along the way. She holds an MFA in Directing from UCLA and a BA in Creative Writing from Columbia University.
