A film director, acting coach, and Drama Teacher at IIT Bombay. He is the founder of Indriyaan Theatre Group and the author of the upcoming book ANTI ACTING: The Actor’s Blueprint for Authenticity—a comprehensive guide to truthful performance for the camera, rooted in the Sanford Meisner principle that “Acting is living truthfully under the imaginary circumstances.”

Ashwin believes that before you are an actor, you are a human being. And it is the human in you—with all your unique scars, joys, and sensitivities—who becomes the actor. You are the instrument. His films speak the same language he teaches. His short film The World Beyond Me premiered in Canada at the Mosaic South Asian Film Festival, a Canadian Screen Award-qualifying festival, moving audiences with its humanistic storytelling. Another short film, Half a Bite, won the Audience Choice Award at the Emerging Lens Cultural Film Festival—also a Canadian Screen Award qualifier. His feature film Broken Mirror, an unflinching exploration of body dysmorphia, won the Best Indie Feature Award at the Los Angeles Film Awards.

Ashwin trained in acting under Barbara Marchant, a senior Meisner Technique faculty member from the William Esper Studio in New York, who also wrote a compelling foreword for his book Anti-Acting. During his training, she instilled in him the essential principle that “the foundation of acting is the reality of doing.” He later spent a year studying filmmaking with Peter Markham, former Head of Directing at the AFI Conservatory, where he deepened his understanding of cinematic language, visual storytelling, and performance for the screen. This unique combination of training in both the actor’s craft and the director’s perspective shapes his teaching approach. Under his mentorship, actors don’t simply learn techniques, they experience a quiet transformation in how they observe, respond, and live truthfully within a scene.