Aneesh Chaganty (born January 30, 1991 in Redmond, Washington state) is an American movie director.
Aneesh grew up living in San Jose, California with his parents, immigrants from Andhra Pradesh, India, who are the co-founders of the software publishing company AppEnsure Inc.
After his short film Seeds became a viral success on YouTube in 2014, Chaganty would spend the next two years creating commercials for Google. After working on many short films and videos, Aneesh found himself given a production budget offer to turn one of short film pitches into a proper theatrical feature. This project would become the 2018 mystery thriller Searching. Searching proved to be a critical and financial success. He would be co-awarded Alfred P. Sloan Feature Film Prize at 2018's Sundance Film Festival, alongside co-writer and producer Sev Ohanian.
In 2018, Chaganty would direct his second film, Run, also co-written by Ohanian. While originally intended for a 2020 theatrical release, the film would instead be released directly to Hulu on November 20 as a result of the COVID-19 pandemic. Despite this, Run proved to an impressive second outing, with the streaming site reporting it to be the most-watched original film in their history (for a short while anyway), in addition to glowing reviews.
He also produced the spiritual sequel to Searching, Missing (2023).
