Mohanalakshmi Rajakumar is a South Asian American novelist, scholar, and screenwriter, with a PhD in English, who tells women-centric stories in unusual settings.

In her routines and writing, audiences experience what it means to be brown and female in a supposedly post racial era. Mohana creates humorous feminist and cultural content like in her solo show Being Brown is My Superpower, in which she channels a lifetime of cultural misunderstandings. An award-winning novelist, she writes compelling characters in diverse settings. Named a SheWrites New Novelist, with several Best Indie book titles, in the Crimes in Arabia series, she explores the seams of life in the Arabian Gulf though the eyes of a female Arab detective and her grumpy cop sidekick turned husband.

Her screenwriting has also been recognized by the Austin Film Festival, Humanitas Awards, WrapWomen Pitch Fest and BRIC Open TV Pitch competition. Most recently, she wrote and produced Me Against the World, a collegiate romantic comedy, with diverse leads and a sports element which has been named a Best American Short, Best Romantic comedy, and an official selection at 8 international film festivals and winner at 5. In her second short film, American Baby, an Indian expat couple tries to order tacos for the first time and inadvertently holds up the lunch line.

She is also founder and creative director of the Short Film Lab, an incubator for first time female filmmakers in their teens and twenties based in the Middle East.