Ayla Khan / عائلہ خان

Ayla Khan is a New York–based writer-director from Karachi, Pakistan. She graduated from Yale University in 2021 with Honors in History before turning to filmmaking, and is currently an MFA candidate in Graduate Filmmaking at NYU Tisch School of the Arts.

Inspired by stream-of-consciousness writing, poetry, music, and global cinema, her films are rooted in mood, sensation, and psychology — where feeling, rhythm, and emotion shape narrative as powerfully as plot. Often inflected by South Asian spiritual traditions and women's subjectivities, they blend tactile realism with dreamlike and genre-inflected elements to create immersive worlds pulsing with emotional charge.

But she makes many different kinds of films: meditative and chaotic, tender and ironic, emotional and comedic, united less by genre than by a distinct embodied sensibility, a way of seeing and attending to the world. She believes in film as testimony and contact, and in the act of making as equally vital: community building in pursuit of stories that honor the fullness of human experience.