Manisha of Themm: Reclaiming Storytelling, Redefining Love

There’s a particular calm when Manisha speaks—an ease that makes you lean in, as if she’s about to hand you a secret you’ve been waiting your whole life to hear. But behind that calm is a fire. As founder of THEMM, a media agency born out of necessity and vision, Manisha is rewriting what it means to be Indo-Caribbean in a world that has so often tried to reduce her community to the margins.

Her latest work, the collaborative film LOVE , is both personal and a rebellion. It is not just a title, but an instruction, a demand, a hymn

Growing Up in the Absence of Reflection

Growing up Guyanese in New York City, Manisha rarely saw herself in the glossy pages of magazines, the silver of a movie screen, or even the crowded aisles of beauty campaigns. And if she did, it was through the cracked lens of stereotype.

“We were the punchline,” she says. “I felt like that’s how the world viewed me—that I couldn’t be the main character.”

It is a sentiment familiar to many Indo-Caribbeans. The lack of respectful representation was more than a glossed-over recognition—it was an erasure. A narrative that suggested brown girls could only be one-dimensional. But rather than accept that role, Manisha began to resist it.

“Every day I remind myself—I am meant to be here. My story is not small. And if I’m here, then so is my community, so is my culture. We arrive together.”

Loss, Memory, and the Art of Reclamation

Her resistance is rooted in her experiences. At five years old, Manisha immigrated to the United States. From Brooklyn to Queens, her family moved as they found their footing—mind you, as the first of their generation to set roots on American soil. In the shuffle, almost all of their family artifacts vanished.

She recalls one photograph in particular—her grandfather, the man who carried the weight of sponsorship papers across oceans, standing beside her as a child. “It’s gone now,” she says. “And with it, a part of my ancestry.”

But that loss is also ancestral. “Our people have always had to leave behind pieces of ourselves, first through indentureship and colonization, and then again as immigrants. We lost photos, stories, roots. Storytelling became the only way back.”

Through photography, through poetry, through film, she has rebuilt what was once taken. Each project is not just art—it is an archive.

The Kinship of Collaboration

Manisha’s ability to find community across cultures is at the heart of LOVE. Created with Michelle Ortiz and Astrid Graham, the film pulses with a shared Caribbean spirit. “We bonded over food, over produce that only grows where we’re from,” she recalls. “It was kinship, a feeling of home.”

In Ortiz’s poem

LOVE, which weaves itself into the film, that kinship takes language:

Love yourself back into existence 

Love your spirit back into your body 

Tether her there, nourish her…

The words become both spell and salve, a reminder that to love oneself is to honor survival, lineage, and the mothers who carried dreams across borders.

Breaking the Box

Yet Manisha is clear-eyed about the challenges. Before she was producing films, she modeled. “There were times I was the only person of color on set,” she remembers. “Other times, I was included only because I was brown—nothing more.”

The binary was suffocating: either erased or tokenized. She laughs gently, recalling the endless questions—“Where’s Guyana?” “So you’re Indian?”—but behind the laugh is a fatigue carried by generations of Indo-Caribbeans whose identities are constantly mistaken, conflated, or ignored.

There were even moments when she hid. “I wouldn’t talk about what I ate for dinner, even if it was the best Guyanese food, because I didn’t want to explain. I didn’t want the comments.”

These are the silences that she finds her voice in now. THEMM—and the film LOVE—were created for this very reason. It is a diversity of cultures that all speak the same language: love.

Love as Rebellion

The film is intimate, vulnerable, and unapologetic. It is about tenderness between people, but also the tenderness of returning to oneself, to culture, to memory. It is a reclamation, a love letter, and a fight song all at once.

“We deserve to be whoever we want to be,” she says. And her voice does not waver.

Watch LOVE. Let it remind you of the stories that built you, the kinships that sustain you, and the love that will always, always carry you home.

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