Smriti Nevatia has worked as a film and theatre critic, and as film researcher, scriptwriter and co-director. She has been writer, director and executive producer for a range of fiction and non-fiction shows on TV, and was a core team member on Bharat ki Chhap, a 13-part series on the history of science and technology in the Indian subcontinent, directed by Chandita Mukherjee, produced by the Department of Science and Technology, Govt. of India, and telecast on Doordarshan in 1989. She wrote the copy for three of the historical galleries in the permanent Discovery of India exhibition housed at the Nehru Centre, Bombay. Since 2004, Smriti has collaborated with filmmaker Nishtha Jain on award-winning documentaries such as City of Photos, 6 Yards to Democracy, At My Doorstep, Lakshmi and Me, and Gulabi Gang.

Smriti has been Curator of several film festivals. She co-curated an international queer film festival, Queer Nazariya, held in Bombay in 2010, and is Curator of the Our Lives…To Live film festival series presented by the India chapter of IAWRT (the International Association of Women in Radio and Television), of which there have been two travelling editions so far: NO! to gender violence (2012 onwards) and seeking a JUST world! (2014 onwards). She also curated the Men and Boys for Gender Justice Film Festival (New Delhi, 2014) for the MenEngage Global Symposium on masculinities, and Doosra Chashma, a gender-themed travelling film festival for film and media students initiated by the NGO Population First. She was co-curator of IAWRT India’s Asian Women’s Film Festival (New Delhi, 2016). She has also served on the jury of national and international film festivals – most recently, the Afghanistan International Women’s Film Festival (Kabul, 2016).

She has participated in conferences on media and cultural studies, and feminist concerns, presenting papers in Mysore, Istanbul, Kathmandu, Kolkata. She conducts film appreciation and scriptwriting workshops with film and media students and for NGOs, speaks in academic and activist spaces on issues of gender and sexuality, and freelances as a text editor and translator in English and Hindi.

Smriti was co-editor of Sites and Practices: An Exercise in Cultural Pedagogy (Majlis 2006); co-researcher and co-author of the research report Breaking the Binary: understanding concerns and realities of queer persons assigned gender female at birth across a spectrum of lived gender identities (2013); and co-author of a longer book based on the same four-year-long research and its findings, No Outlaws in the Gender Galaxy (Zubaan 2015).