Parida Tantiwasadakran is a Thai-American, Oscar-qualified writer/director and sound mixer whose films have premiered at multiple festivals around the world, including Slamdance, Short Shorts & Asia, and the Chicago Children’s International Film Festival. Her film "Young People, Old People & Nothing in Between" earned a spot on the 2024 Academy Awards long-list after winning Best Live Action Short at deadCenter Film Festival, and is one of the few student films to receive a review on RogerEbert.com. The film premiered on the highly curated NOWNESS channel, won awards at festivals in Berlin, Busan, and Vancouver, and was distributed in Japan and Taiwan. She holds an MFA in Directing from UCLA and a BA in Creative Writing from Columbia University.
As a sound mixer, Parida worked on "Sunfish" (dir. Sierra Falconer), which premiered at the 2025 Sundance Film Festival. She has done commercial work for Whole Foods, BuzzFeed, WeFolk, and Univision, to name a few. She believes that working in sound enriches her sensibilities as a director, deepening her attention to the auditory experience in film and recognizing its vitality.
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, and the Foreign Language & Area Studies Fellowship bestowed by the U.S. Department of Education—all of which reflect her commitment to diversity and her belief in uplifting other underrepresented filmmakers along the way.
She is currently writing her first feature, a mystery-comedy akin to a teenage "Knives Out," based on an AP test–stealing scandal that occurred at her high school. She also has a fully developed short ready to be shot, called "Lukee the Undead"—a horror-comedy best described as "immigrant 'Shaun of the Dead.'" It follows a Thai chef named Lukee, who runs a restaurant with her useless niece and nephew, dies in a robbery, and returns from the dead to whip them into shape.
