The winners of the 2025 edition of India's 'Next Top 10 Directors' were revealed at an event in Mumbai on 10 September.

Hosted in Mercii (Manifest's venue partners for the event), the free-to-enter event was graced by more than 130 attendees from across advertising. 

D&AD, a global non-profit that supports excellence in design and art direction in commercial creativity, partnered with Manifest for the second edition of the awards.

The winners were:

• Devika Chaturvedi
• Disha Daswani
• Indrasish Mukherjee
• Isha Ashta 
• John Fredrick Peter Mayne
• Ria Singh
• Roopali Singhal
• Sapna Singh
• Shachi Malhotra 
• Swaroop Kumar

The jury for the second edition was:

• Afshan Hussain Shaikh, director and founder, Not Bad Films
• Eduardo Karas, partner and creative music director, Canja Audio Culture
• Olivier Venturini, France based ad-film director, and film-maker
• Ram Madhvani, founder and director, Equinox Films
• Shirsha Guha Thakurta, director, Oink Films
• Vinil Mathew, co-founder and director, Breathless Films

Akshat Verma, a screenwriter, and producer, was the chief guest for the event. Verma won the Filmfare Award for Best Screenplay and the Screen Award for Best Story for Delhi Belly. He also wrote and directed the short film Mama’s Boys and Kaalakaandi. Verma has directed Bandwaale (upcoming on Amazon Prime Video) and served as executive producer on Aryan Khan’s Netflix series The Ba***ds of Bollywood.

She Directs Ads was the outreach partner for the awards.