Sonali Ohrie (b. 1995, London, UK).

I’m a Los Angeles based photographer and director.

I work across multiple sides of the shoot: strategy, creative directing the world, then executing the vision - either just myself or alongside my crew.

I start by understanding the brand or talent deeply (their taste, their goals, where they're headed). What is the end goal and platform we’re presenting the content on. Then build a body of work from there. Sometimes a fresh perspective from scratch, sometimes a cohesive world built out from what's already there. To attest this, I’m usually the one Creative Directing all the shoots I’m on.

My first job was working with Damien Hirst, the UK's most successful living artist, watching up close how he actually operates - not just the art, but the business underneath it. The artists who last aren't just talented, they're consistent. Them and their audience know exactly what their world looks like before they walk into the room. From there I learned about the power of a brand, the business of art and how to tell its story.

I built a producing brain running campaigns and social content, ideation to execution. First at a media agency in London with clients including Calvin Klein, then through my own social agency helping content creators develop their story on a social platforms. I bring a creative vision with the knowledge on how to get it built, budgeted, staffed, and delivered without losing what made it good in the first place.

I am a South Asian photographer and director, raised in a modern, spiritual Hindu-Punjabi household in England. Perspectives like mine, Indian female voices behind the camera, remain strikingly rare in the industry. Determined to change that, I left full-time employment to pursue a future where Asian female photographers are no longer underrepresented. That mission began publicly with my TEDx talk on South Asian image makers.

My image A Mother's Journey won the TIME Human Element Award and the Female in Focus Global Photographer Award from the British Journal of Photography, the world's oldest photography institution. The work was exhibited in both London and New York - honours awarded for my very first professional portrait.

2023 was a turning point: the first video I created and directed was picked up by Vogue and Levi's. Soon after, I made my official video directing debut with Platoon, Apple.

Since then, I've collaborated with some of today's most influential cultural figures: Sabrina Carpenter, EGOT artist John Legend, multi-award winner Khalid, Avantika Vandanapu (the first Indian American to lead a Disney Channel Original Movie), and acclaimed actress and producer Priyanka Chopra. Today, I'm proud to be co-signed by Rankin, the influential photographer and director who helped define fashion and popular culture's visual language in the 1990s and early 2000s.

What I bring to a brand or an artist shaping their identity: ideas rooted in consistent storytelling that build the world you're leveraging, and the ability to execute it - whether that's a still shoot, directing, or crewing up within budget.