GAUTAM & BUDDHA premiered at the Transilvania International Film Festival in 2019. It was previously selected for the 2016 IFP Doc Lab, and awarded an Individual Artist grant by the New York State Council on the Arts.

Shayok Mukhopadhyay (Director, Producer, DP) grew up in Kolkata, India and graduated from the Documentary Photography and Photojournalism program at the International Center of Photography in New York in 2012. His first solo show of photographs, Québec, took place at Katharine Mulherin Projects in Toronto in 2013. His installation, Back Home, was part of the 2017 Bronx Museum's AIM Biennial exhibition. In 2019, he completed a six-month artist residency at Atelier Mondial, Basel, and had a solo show at DOCK, Basel titled Calcutta Corner. This was a site-specific installation using photographic and audio material. Shayok is a NYSCA/NYFA Artist Fellow.

Nadav Harel (Editor), founder of NoProcess Films, Tel Aviv, studied filmmaking at the School of Visual Arts, New York. He has worked on documentary and fiction films as editor, writer, cinematographer, producer and director. His work has been shown at the Museum of Natural History and Museum of Modern Art in New York, and on multiple broadcast outlets such as the BBC. He recently edited KIVALINA, which premiered at the Berlinale in 2016.

Tirthankar Guhathakurta (Community Adviser) is a Kolkata-based gay rights activist, filmmaker, physician. His semi-autobiographical coming-out film PIKU IS FINE (2004) is widely cited in academic and popular gay rights literature about India. In 2012, he founded the group SACH (Students Against Campus Homophobia). He teaches psychology to post-graduate students at Calcutta University, and speaks frequently to the medical community in an effort to reduce homophobia in the profession.