Katya Ustinova is a Russian-born documentary filmmaker living in New York. She has worked as a TV producer, screenwriter, and reporter for almost ten years prior to switching over to documentary filmmaking. She got her MFA in Social Documentary from the School of Visual Arts in New York in 2012, along with receiving a Paula Rhodes Award for exceptional achievement in Documentary Filmmaking for her thesis film. Over the past several years, she has been working on three feature length films, covering very different themes, stories and characters. As the other two films are still in progress, Shtetlers (2020) is her first completed feature length documentary.

In December 2020 Shtetlers won The Laurel Branch National TV& Documentary Film Award for Best Debut in Moscow, Russia.