Yash Raj Films appoints Usha Rachael Thomas as head of communications strategy

MUMBAI: Studios sell stories for a living, but how they tell their own story is a different craft entirely, and Yash Raj Films has just handed that job to someone with two decades of newsroom instinct behind her. YRF, India’s premier legacy entertainment company, has appointed Usha Rachael Thomas as head of communications strategy, a role in which she will report directly to Akshaye Widhani, chief executive officer at Yash Raj Films.

The brief is a sprawling one. Thomas will oversee the outward-facing narrative for both YRF and its talent agency, covering press relations, social media strategy, brand voice, talent positioning and image management, while deepening the company’s relationships with global and local media across its various business ventures. That last part matters: a studio operating at YRF’s scale, spanning film, television and talent management, needs communications infrastructure that can flex across genuinely different audiences and markets simultaneously, rather than a single unified press office approach.

Widhani framed the appointment around exactly that need for scale, arguing that as YRF’s businesses grow globally, how the company tells its stories to the world matters as much as the stories themselves. He pointed to Thomas’s adaptive, agile newsroom instincts, honed over two decades leading communications for some of India’s largest media and entertainment companies, as the quality that would prove instrumental in building communications strategies built for scale across the group’s businesses.

The résumé backing that confidence is a genuinely substantial one. A former journalist with Indiantelevision.com and HT Media, Thomas has since led public relations and corporate communications at STAR India’s Hindi, Bangla and Marathi GEC division, at Zee Entertainment Enterprises across its Hindi GEC, cinema, FTA and premium clusters, and at MX Player, building integrated communications strategies across some of Indian television’s most recognisable fiction and non-fiction properties, spanning OTT, film, celebrity brand campaigns and corporate mandates.

Her track record includes some fairly notable wins too. She led the #ZeeForAll initiative around the satellite premiere of Dangal, which included an industry-first accessibility feature for visually challenged audiences and earned an Abby Award Gold, alongside a Cannes Lion for Lux’s “The End” campaign. She has also led one of India’s earliest OTT business case studies, on MX Player, developed in collaboration with MICA and published by Ivey Publishing, a case study listed by the Harvard Case Centre and featured on Ivey’s Bestsellers 2025-26 list, a credential that speaks to genuine strategic depth rather than purely tactical PR execution.

In her new role, Thomas will also build out positioning strategies across PR and social media for YRF’s roster of talent, including Rani Mukerji, Ayushmann Khurrana, Sonam Kapoor, Ahaan Panday, Aneet Padda, Sharvari, Vaani Kapoor and Shreya Chaudhry, a client list that spans generations of Bollywood stardom and gives a sense of just how broad her mandate now is. For a studio managing both its own corporate image and the public narratives of some of Indian cinema’s biggest names simultaneously, bringing in someone with journalism instincts baked into her communications approach looks like a fairly shrewd bet.