His films have won several national and international awards including the FIPRESCI (International Film Critics Award) at the Oberhausen Film Festival (Germany), the Gold Mikaldi at Bilbao (Spain), the Golden Conch and Best Film Award at the Mumbai International Film Festival (MIFF), a jury’s special mention prize at the 66th Venice Film festival, and four National Awards (Silver Lotus). In 2007, his film Kramasha was included in critic Jonathan Rosenbaum’s list of essential films of all time.

Retrospectives of his work have taken place at various museums and festivals such as the Berkeley Art Museum and Pacific Film Archive, the University of California, the Freer and Sackler Gallery, the Smithsonian Museum, the International Short Film Festival in Oberhausen, Germany, the Cinéma du Réel, Centre Pompidou, Paris; e-flux (New York), and KNMA (India).

He has published six books of art history, children’s literature, poems, novels, journals, and the water systems of the Kangra Valley. His first novel in Hindi, This Village Does Not Exist, was awarded the Krishna Baldev Vaid Award for Outstanding Contribution to Experimental Hindi Literature and was shortlisted for the 2023 Armory Square Prize for South Asian Literature in Translation. His book of short stories for children was included in Tata Trusts’ Parag Honours List 2022. He has taught at the National Institute of Design (NID), Ahmedabad, and the Film and Television Institute of India (FTII), Pune. In 2015, he joined the Indian Institute of Advanced Study as a Tagore fellow, where he wrote Invisible Webs: An Art Historical inquiry into the Life and Death of Jangarh Singh Shyam. He is currently working on a speculative novel in Hindi.