Writer, Director, Actress, and definitely overthinking this.
Sabrina Saleha is a Diné (Navajo)/Bengali director, screenwriter and actress.
As fate would have it, her Navajo mom and Bengali dad found love in the club, and the rest is herstory. Born both Indigenous to this land and a first-generation daughter of an immigrant, Sabrina no longer stresses over which ethnicity checkbox to mark—she proudly blends culture and comedy like the perfect recipe.
She is making her directorial debut with the upcoming short film Legend of Fry-Roti: Rise of the Dough, a quirky comedy about a biracial niece caught in the ultimate bread battle when her Navajo and Bengali aunties clash over which bread reigns supreme—Navajo Frybread or Bengali Roti. With her 25th birthday on the line, she must navigate this high-stakes kitchen showdown to discover the true meaning of dough-mestic harmony.
Her film has been supported by the Vision Maker Media Creative Shorts Fellowship, the Georgia Film Impact Grant, and the First Peoples Fund Fellowship.
Sabrina is a 2024 graduate of the NYU Tisch Directing Intensive for Indigenous Voices, a 2023 imagineNATIVE Screenwriting Feature Lab fellow (Netflix), a 2023 Native American Animation Lab fellow (Sony Animation), and a 2022 Native American Media alliance TV Writer’s Lab fellow (LA SkinsFest).
She earned her Master of Fine Arts in Screenwriting from the Institute of American Indian Arts (IAIA) in May 2023, receiving scholarships from Warner Bros. Discovery, the American Indian Circle Fellowship, and the Navajo Nation.
As an actress, her recent credits include Barry, Marvel’s Echo, Single Drunk Female, Station 19, the cleaning lady, Panhandle, and Echoes. She also starred as the lead in the theater production Diné Nishłį (I Am a Sacred Being): A Boarding School Play. Her voiceover work is featured in the PlayStation video game The Foglands.
