Tannishtha Chatterjee is an Indian actress and director best known in the west for her performance in the British film Brick Lane (2007), the film adaptation of Monica Ali's best selling novel of the same name for which she was nominated best actress at the British Independent Film Awards. Her other notable roles have been in Academy Award-winning German director Florian Gallenberger's film Shadows of Time, Road, Movie with Abhay Deol, Dekh Indian Circus, for which she won the National Film Award – Special Jury Award / Special Mention (Feature Film) and Marathi film Doctor Rakhmabai for which she has won the Best Actress Award at RIFF (Rajasthan International Film Festival) and PIFF (Pune International Film Festival). In 2019 she directed her first feature film Roam Rome Mein.

Early life
Chatterjee was born in Pune, Maharashtra, to a Bengali Hindu family. Her father was a business executive and her mother was a political science professor. Her family traveled and lived out of the country for some time, then moved to Delhi. She majored in Chemistry at Delhi University before entering the National School of Drama.