Kenja Chethan Kumar

Kenja Chethan Kumar was born in Kenja village in the Udupi district of Karnataka. He hails from an agricultural family. His parents are into agriculture.

His grandfather, late Kemthur Doddanna Shetty[2][3] was a playwright, actor, singer and a director who wrote plays in the Tulu language.[4][5] One of his plays was staged 6666 times. In his childhood, Kenja came across an article about his grandfather which inspired him to start writing plays. He wrote his first play when he was only 12 years old.[6]

He did his schooling in a Kannada medium school, Nithya Sahaya Hiriya Prathamika Shaale, Irandadi and completed his high school from Vidya Nagar Govt. High School in Mudarangadi. Due to financial problems at home he joined Besant Evening College, Kodailbail in Mangaluru as he could study in the evening while working in several jobs during the day.[7]

During his high school days he noticed that most of the audience preferred films over plays and Kenja realized that his own interests had begun shifting towards films. Around the same time he watched a movie directed by the well known Kannada actor Updendra and that was when he decided to pursue a career in film direction.

Kenja came to Bengaluru to work towards film direction, during which he came across an Interview of the Indian filmmaker Rajkumar Hirani where he talks about being an Editor and that it helped his career as a film director. As one can learn a lot from the editing table. That is when Kenja took a few courses on Editing after which he worked in some well known TV channels like Asianet Suvarna, TV9 Kannada, Star India Pvt Ltd.[8] During the course of his work he acquired technical skills like DI, Stereo 3D, graphic software and gained some more knowledge on shooting and post production. He worked as a full time video editor for approximately 7 years before quitting his job to pursue his own direction ventures.

• Kenja Chethan Kumar at IMDb
• Kenja Chethan Kumar on Book My Show