Munjal Yagnik is an award-winning director and cinematographer best known for his crime thriller Scarlet Winter, for which he won Best Director at both the North Hollywood CineFest and the Snowdance Independent Film Festival. The film earned wide recognition, including Best Picture at the North Hollywood CineFest and Best Community Spotlight Feature at the Phoenix Film Festival. It also screened at the San Diego International Film Festival alongside Oscar-winning films. Scarlet Winter premiered on Apple TV and is available on Amazon Prime and other major streaming platforms. Yagnik's latest feature is Land in Freedom—a documentary portrait of Black farmers navigating the historic decline of Black-owned farmland in America.

Yagnik brings his storytelling expertise to client projects, collaborating with major brands to translate their marketing campaigns into compelling visual stories. His strength is synthesis—taking intangible ideas and brand aspirations and shaping them into tangible audio-visual content that audiences see, feel, and remember. Whether as Director, Director of Photography, or full-service production partner, he applies the same craft and narrative instinct that defines his artistic practice to every commercial project.

Yagnik is an Associate Professor in the School of Film and Animation at Rochester Institute of Technology. His research explores image pipeline development, decentralized cinematography workflows and their implications for auteurship, and virtual production in the context of cinematography—its technical challenges, creative potential, and how far it can stretch an audience's suspension of disbelief. He currently has two short films on the festival circuit: Northeast, where he contributed as Director of Photography, Line Producer, and Post-Production Supervisor, and Happy Anniversary, which he wrote, directed, and edited. Happy Anniversary was made entirely using virtual production.

His work has been disseminated at major conferences, including those of the University Film and Video Association (UFVA) and the Alliance for the Arts in Research Universities (a2ru). His presentations include Changing Cinematography Pedagogy for Developing Competence in Inclusive Creative Expression (2024 a2ru Conference), A Cinematography Approach to Create an Illusion of Reality Using Virtual Production (2024 UFVA Conference), and Collaboration as a Conduit to Professional Development, Pedagogy, and Research (2024 UFVA Conference).