Festival and the Grand Jury Prize in the World Cinema Documentary Competition at the 2022 Sundance Film Festival.

Sen is a graduate of Jamia Millia Islamia and holds a Ph.D. from the School of Arts and Aesthetics at JNU, Delhi. His academic and early professional pursuits garnered support from various organizations, including the Films Division of India Documentary Fellowship (2013), CSDS-Sarai Digital and Social Media Fellowship (2014), Pro Helvetia Residency (2016), and the Charles Wallace Fellowship (2018). In 2018, he also engaged as a visiting scholar in Cambridge University’s ERC Urban Ecologies project.

His debut feature-length documentary, ‘Cities of Sleep’ (2016), found recognition at esteemed international film festivals like Dok Leipzig, MAMI – Mumbai International Film Festival, Taiwan International Film Festival, the Seattle South Asian Film Festival, and New York Indian Film Festival. Shaunak co-curated ‘Downtime’ in 2014, a live-event installation simultaneously held at the Goethe Institute (Delhi) and Neukölln (Berlin). He also played a key role in co-curating the live performance/video installation event ‘Notes on Mourning’ (Khoj Studios) in 2015 and participated in the Copycat Academy Residency at the Luminatos Film Festival (Toronto).