Meja Shoba is a graduate of UCLA’s MFA Film Directing program, and a writer and director from Oakland, CA who lives in Johannesburg, South Africa. Her multi-lingual short film, Dear Pearl, was a DGA Grand Prize student film award recipient, and screened at the New Orleans Film Festival and Durban International Film Festival. Meja wrote and directed Get There, a short film that premiered at the Seattle International Film Festival (SIFF) and competed in the international competition with Shnit Worldwide Short Film Festival. Her 2013 short film Boys of Soweto, has travelled to numerous international film festivals and museum screenings, including Berlin Fashion Festival, New York Fashion Film Festival, Pan African Film Festival, and LACMA’s Young Director’s Night. She is a writer and supervising producer of Netflix Africa’s show, Classified, a South African and American (Skybound Productions) produced TV show. In 2022, she was selected for France’s Series Mania Deental Institute Programme for her pilot TV Show, Boys of Soweto, which is currently in development. As a commercial director, Meja has directed numerous commercials and digital content for brands such as Ben Sherman, Loreal’s Dark n’ Lovely, Vaseline, and Falke. Meja received a bachelor’s degree in English literature and Japanese from Colgate University, and an MFA in Directing from University of California, Los Angeles (UCLA).