Roopa Rao, a filmmaker, remembers sitting in a projector room as a child and watching movies. Her passion for films persisted and six years after working at Infosys, she quit. After a course at the Asian Academy of Film & Television, she left to assist a documentary filmmaker in London. On returning, she worked on a few short films, but her first feature film as a co-director was the comedy thriller Vishnuvardhana (2011).

She is popularly known for her partially crowd funded web series The Other Love Story. It is Indias first same sex love story in the form of a web series. It not only won her awards for Best Director (NYC Web Fest 2016) and Best Story (Toronto Web Fest 2017), but also received 60 million views on Youtube. The Week Magazine honoured her as woman of the year in 2016.

In 2018, Roopa co-founded an independent production company with a friend - Ameyukti Studios. Her 2019 release, Gantumoote, is her debut feature film as a director, writer and producer. It is a coming of age film, telling the story of Meera, a teenage girl who must deal with academic pressure, bullying as well as her first love.