Modern Mythmaker
Sarena Khan is a producer, writer, and storyteller who was raised to believe that the pursuit of telling great stories is worth risking everything for. She began as an actor, earning her BFA in Theatre and Cinematic Arts at the University of Southern California and continuing her education with the Royal Shakespeare Company. Her move behind the camera felt less like a departure than a natural evolution, a way to shape the kinds of stories she had always wanted to see. The years she spent in black box theaters, dissecting and performing playwrights like Shakespeare, Ibsen, Lorca, Mamet, and Albee, gave her an understanding of story and humanity from the inside out that continues to shape how she works with directors and actors today.
For several years, Sarena served as Senior Vice President of Film and Television at Graphic India, the global leader in Indian-themed character entertainment. The studio produced more than 300 comics and graphic novels with over 1 Billion cumulative views and over 500 episodes of animation. Its series The Legend of Hanuman and Baahubali: Crown of Blood became record-breaking hits for Disney+ Hotstar in India, while the feature film The Archies, directed by Zoya Akhtar for Netflix, ranked among the platform’s top non-English-language films globally. There, Sarena’s work spanned collaborations in development, production, adaptations, and co-writing with some of the most influential creators of our time: Newbery Medal-winning author Neil Gaiman, Marvel creator Stan Lee, BAFTA Award-winning director Shekhar Kapur, legendary filmmaker John Woo, comics legend Grant Morrison, Academy Award nominated Gladiator and Amistad writer David Franzoni, and Academy Award-nominated writers of Children of Men and Iron Man, Mark Fergus and Hawk Ostby, amongst others.
As a writer and creator, she co-wrote and adapted projects including Cinnamon with Neil Gaiman, Monkey Master, based on the graphic novel by Stan Lee and Sharad Devarajan, with Fergus, Ostby, and John Woo, and Devi with Shekhar Kapur and Sunil Nayar. Before that, Sarena co-founded her first company, Athena Pictures, a female-led independent production entity (incubated by American Entertainment Investors whose credits include La La Land, Sicario, and 12 Years a Slave). As an entrepreneurial young producer at Athena, Sarena was able to do the tough work of getting multiple first-time feature director’s films made.
Her producing career began with the indie feature Adult Interference and spans multiple films and series. Most recently she served as lead producer on ANSWR, written and directed by Stephen Kay (Yellowstone, Landman, Lioness), shot entirely on location in Iceland in the dead of winter, which just launched sales at Cannes 2026. Across all of her projects, she has led every stage of the filmmaking process, through creation, development, financing, production, sales, and distribution. Sarena is drawn to stories she is uniquely suited to tell, ones rooted in the worlds she has lived in, the causes she has fought for, the passions that move her, the stories that excite her, regardless of the risk. While developing The Last Wild, a wildlife crime-thriller, she and her collaborators traveled to Africa to embed with criminal networks and subject-matter experts driving the global poaching crisis to get the story firsthand, no matter the danger.
Now focused on her new venture, Sarena is building a slate of film and television projects that reflect everything she has built toward. At the center of her slate is Khan Artist, based on the true story of one of the most controversial filmmakers in India who became one of the most infamous hash smugglers in the world (if you smoked hash in the ‘80s or ‘90s, it was his!). He ran hash across international borders to fund his movies, risking everything in pursuit of the thing that mattered most to him: telling great stories through film. That man is her father, “Blondie” Khan. It is the most personal project of her career. And as it turns out, the story that started it all. She is based in Los Angeles and Europe and works everywhere else, too.