(new website…eventually arriving)

Hena Ashraf is a writer-director who creates character-based multi-layered narratives, showing how truly connected we all are with the specific being universal, focusing primarily on stories about migrants and migrant life, as migration is such a common, yet disruptive, experience. Born in London to Bihari Muslim working-class parents, she spent her early years in the United Kingdom before im/migrating to America. Hena’s work has been supported by the Brooklyn Arts Council, Tribeca Film Institute, the Islamic Scholarship Fund, the Norris Foundation, BAFTA Los Angeles, MPAA, Wasserman, the Adrienne Shelly Foundation, an ISF National Film Grant, Telluride FilmLAB, the Caucus Foundation, and more. She has an MFA in Film Directing from UCLA. Hena is based in Los Angeles and currently works as an editor.

Making films since her teen years, Hena’s newest film is The Return, a documentary-hybrid film informed by her relationship with her late father. Eager to continue exploring the grey space between what we call “fiction” and “non-fiction” and to show migrant life, Hena is in early development on more projects.

Under her pseudonym of HXA, she is a sometimes-DJ, visual artist and street photographer. Hena enjoys disappearing into her headphones, is a lifelong stutterer, a linguist in a parallel universe somewhere, a natural sharer/curator/collector, and is also many other things, just like everyone else.