Ayla Khan / عائلہ خان

Ayla Khan is a New York–based writer-director from Karachi, Pakistan. She studied History at Yale University, graduating with Honors in 2021—her pursuit of stories inevitably leading her to film. She 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, she blends tactile realism with dreamlike and genre elements to create emotionally charged, immersive worlds.

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 in the act of making as equally vital: community building in pursuit of stories that honor the fullness of human experience.