Sabrina Dhawan is a screenwriter who works between India and the U.S. Her debut film Monsoon Wedding won the Golden Lion at the Venice Film Festival. Other awards and nominations included Golden Globe and BAFTA for Best Foreign Film. Other film credits include Kaminey, Ishqiya, and Cosmopolitan. Her television work includes an unproduced adaptation of Salman Rushdie’s Midnight’s Children for Netflix. She was the book writer on the Monsoon Wedding stage musical which premiered at Berkeley Rep, CA. Dhawan is at work on Chardi Kala, a film about the assassination of Balbir Singh Sodhi, a Sikh gas station owner, a few days after 9/11.
While at MacDowell in 2005, she finished two scripts; one a live-action film for Disney, the other a coming-of-age story set in India in the 1980s. During her 2026 residency, she worked on the first draft of a screenplay set in 1980s New Delhi and on revisions for Chardi Kala, for Excel Entertainment. SShe also found time to try her hand writing an essay about her late husband.
