Vikram Teja Jayanti is a documentary filmmaker responsible for a number of well known full-feature documentary films. Two of his films, for which he has production credits, have received Academy Awards for Best Full-Feature Documentary; the 1997 blockbuster When We Were Kings and 2005's Born Into Brothels. A sampling of his other work includes Innocents Abroad, The Man Who Bought Mustique, James Ellroy's Feast of Death, Game Over: Kasparov And The Machine, and Lincoln. He and his films have also won a number of awards, including the Special Jury Prize at the Sundance Film Festival, and have been nominated for others. Vikram Jayanti was born in New York in 1955, and spent his childhood variously in France, Italy, Switzerland, India, Costa Rica and England, where he attended Tonbridge School followed by Warwick University. After seeing Martin Scorsese's Mean Streets and Werner Herzog's The Enigma of Kaspar Hauser in the same week he moved to Los Angeles in 1977 to become a filmmaker. He began producing anthropological documentaries, including producing In Her Own Time about the anthropologist Barbara Myerhoff, and later ran two documentary film festivals in Los Angeles.