Yousuf Saeed is an independent filmmaker and researcher, and project director of Tasveer Ghar, a digital archive of South Asian popular visual culture. Starting his career in educational television in 1990 by co-directing Turning Point, a science-based TV series for Doordarshan, India's public broadcaster, he moved on to directing documentary films on a variety of subjects, such as Ladakh, Sufi heritage, and India's syncretic cultural traditions. His documentary films Basant, The Train to Heaven, Khayal Darpan, Khusrau Darya Prem Ka, and Campus Rising have been shown at numerous national and international film festivals as well as on TV channels. He has worked at the Encyclopaedia Britannica (India) as image editor on many of its India-specific publications. He has also been a Sarai Fellow (at the Centre for the Study of Developing Societies, New Delhi, 2004), an Asia Fellow (at the Asian Scholarship Foundation, Bangkok, 2005) and a Margaret Beveridge Senior Research Fellow (at Jamia Millia Islamia, New Delhi, 2009) for various research-based projects on media and popular art. He has made lecturing tours in Europe and America, where he has shown his films as well as images from his extensive collection of popular Muslim devotional art. He also co-edited Visual Homes, Image Worlds: Essays from Tasveer Ghar (2015) besides contributing to several recent publications.
