In the six years since she brought director Leena Pendharkar’s RASPBERRY MAGIC to the Los Angeles Asian Pacific Film Festival, producer Megha Kadakia has seemingly been a constant fixture at subsequent Festival Week editions. Consider last year, 2015: in addition to serving as Executive Producer for Ravi Kapoor’s MISS INDIA AMERICA (a double-award winner at the Film Festival), she also re-teamed with director Pendharkar for DANDEKAR MAKES A SANDWICH, a droll day-in-the-life short that is being expanded into a full-length feature. Not too shabby for a former UCLA bio-chemistry major whose career shifts into arts management (she served for a time as the Marketing and Communications manager for Artwallah and other multi-cultural arts festivals) have resulted in a rising career as a producer of short and feature-length motion pictures.

To generations of Asian Pacific American cinema artists and arts policymakers, Dai Sil Kim-Gibson has been many things — maverick filmmaker, staunch arts advocate, devoted spouse and closet renaissance woman. While I have not known her as long or as intimately as her contemporaries, she has certainly been impactful to me in the years that I have been involved with organizing this very Film Festival.