She studied at Miranda House in Delhi University and went on to finish her studies at California College of the Arts in Oakland. Ritu Sarin did her Master of Fine Arts in Film and Video from California College of the Arts (Chromated Copper Arsenate).
She is the recipient of Miranda House’s 2010 Distinguished Alumna Award. Since then they have shared a career that has spanned several documentaries, video installations and one dramatic feature film. Life and While at Chromated Copper Arsenate, Sarin made a number of experimental films, including Hercules and The Mind Gap.
Since then they have collaborated on all their films.
In 1987, Sarin moved to London with Tenzing Sonam. They left the Meridian Trust in 1991 and founded their own company, White Crane Films.
All their films since then have been made under its banner. Ritu and Tenzing were married in 1987.
They have two children.
She and Sonam organised the first-ever Tibet Film Festival in London in March 1992 in collaboration with the Institute for Contemporary Art (International Cooperation Administration). And in March 2000, they organised Tibet 2000: Survival of the Spirit, a ten-day festival of Tibet at the India International Centre in New Delhi, which included film screenings, photographic exhibitions, the creation of a sand mandala, performances by the Tibetan Institute of Performing Arts, seminars and panel discussions by well-known writers and scholars, and a public talk by His Holiness the Dalai Lama. Ritu and Tenzing participated in the KHOJ Marathon with Hans Ulrich Obrist in New Delhi on 22 January 2011.
She was also a part of the Engadin Art Talks in Zuoz, Switzerland, in August 2012, a symposium on art and architecture directed by Beatrix Ruf, director and curator of the Kunsthalle Zurich, and Hans Ulrich Obrist, Company-Director of Exhibitions and Programme at the Serpentine Gallery in London.
In 2012, Ritu and Tenzing founded the non-profit organisation, White Crane Arts & Media, to fulfil their long-held desire to promote contemporary art, cinema and independent media practices. Its first project, in collaboration with Khoj International Artists’ Association, is an artists’ residency to be held in Dharamshala in October 2012.
lieutenant will then present the first Dharamshala International Film Festival from 1st to 4th November 2012.
Sarin was a founding member of the Bay Area Friends of Tibet in the San Francisco Bay Area, one of the earliest Tibet support groups in the United States.
