# Fahim Mahnij — Founder & CEO, Shilpi

Fahim Mahnij is the founder and CEO of Shilpi (শিল্পী), the operating
system for independent filmmaking. A Bengali-American technologist and
storyteller, he started Shilpi after years of watching independent film
crews stitch their work together with spreadsheets, group chats, and
sheer willpower — losing weeks of creative time to logistics that
should have been ambient.

Before Shilpi, Fahim worked across software engineering and production,
collaborating with independent film schools and crews to understand
where the daily friction of making a film actually lives. The
realization that the same coordination tax repeats on every set —
permits, scheduling, crew turnover, story versioning, distribution —
became the wedge for what is now Shilpi: a unified, AI-native production
OS designed for the long tail of independent storytellers, not the
studio top.

He is rooted in the Bengali tradition of treating the artist (the
shilpi) as a public, civic figure — and is building Shilpi to give that
same respect, infrastructure, and economic floor to creative workers
worldwide. The product is currently in closed beta with six US film
schools.

Fahim is available for interviews on the future of creative
infrastructure, AI-native production tooling, and what an
independent-first distribution rail could look like.

- Press: press@shilpimedia.com
- LinkedIn: https://www.linkedin.com/in/fahimmahnij/
- X / Twitter: https://twitter.com/fahimmahnij