Lakshmi Venkat joins UTV as creative director

Lakshmi Venkat has joined United Television as a creative director telefilms.

Venkat, who took up office on 1 October, is responsible for developing new shows and monitoring shows done by her, managing her in house teams as well as external talent on her shows. Apart from being responsible for quality control and high TRPs for her shows, she will also be look after client relationships with the channels, ensuring schedules are fixed and maintained as per client requirements.

UTV?s TV content division consists of multiple creative directors who are responsible for the creative as well as qualitative content of their respective divisions. The other creative directors at UTV are Zarina Mehta, Ramesh Balakrishnan and Neeraj Naik.

Venkat comes to UTV from Zee TV, where she worked first as programming head and before being reassigned in March 2000 to create a new international channel called "Chakra" for the Zee Network.

Prior to Zee, Venkat has worked as general manager, programming and business development for In-House Productions, Mumbai. Before that she was with the IndusInd group, initially on their cable channel project and later as channel chief of In-Mumbai.

She also had a brief stint as vice-president of Shogun Films, before getting back to freelance production with various assignments: supervising producer for a chat show on Home TV; city producer for the election specials on national broadcaster Doordarshan; as well as consultant on concept and design of a daily breakfast show.