Aalisha hopes to create, develop and champion cutting-edge and radically underserved South-Asian CENTERED GLOBAL narratives that connect to the universality of the human spirit.
Aalisha Sheth is a screenwriter, playwright and short fiction writer.
Aalisha writes about flawed and ferociously funny women who straddle with power and desire in the worlds they occupy, and are at a tipping point in their lives. She enjoys exploring the relationship dynamics of dysfunctional families, peppering love stories with cheeky subversion, bringing chaos to the coming-of-age and infusing magical realism into the mundane. Her all-time favourite stories are those that pack all of the above genres into a deliciously dark tale.
Aalisha earned her M.F.A. in Writing for the Screen and Stage from Northwestern University, IL, USA, where she was awarded Northwestern’s Advanced Sitcom Award for co-creating the comedy pilot UNITED STATES of ALIENS, which had a special mention screening with the Chicago South Asian Film Festival, was a semi-finalist with the MACRO Episodic Lab powered by The Black List, and is currently streaming on Open Television. Aalisha was also selected as a fellow for the 1st OTV x Sundance: Emerging Storytellers of Chicago initiative, hosted in partnership with the Sundance Institute at the Wachowski sisters’ Kinowerks studios.
Her sci-fi pilot THE REINCARNATES received a reading at the Wirtz Center for Performing Arts, and was a finalist of the Bigfoot Script Challenge. Aalisha also received NALIP’s Emerging Content Creators Scholarship to attend the 2020 Latino Media Fest. In 2021 and 2023, Aalisha served as a mentor with the Mezcla Media Collective, in a year-long program designed to support and enable emerging Chicago-based women of color filmmakers.
Aalisha has taught Foundations of Screenwriting 101 as a Graduate Teaching Assistant at Northwestern University, and has been a Creative Writing Instructor/facilitator with Writopia Lab.
She recently worked as a Staff Writer on the drama series SHOWTIME which is streaming on Disney+Hotstar.
Aalisha has multiple projects in development with major global streaming platforms.
She lives and works between India and the United States.
