Deepa Mehta, OC OOnt ([diːpa ˈmeːɦta]; born 15 September 1950) is an Indian-born Canadian film director and screenwriter, best known for her Elements trilogy, Fire (1996), Earth (1998), and Water (2005), the last being nominated for Best Foreign Language Film at the Academy Awards.

Earth was submitted by India as its official entry for the Academy Award for Best Foreign Language Film, and Water was Canada's official entry for the Academy Award for Best Foreign Language Film, making it only the third non-French-language Canadian film submitted in that category after Attila Bertalan's 1990 invented-language film A Bullet to the Head and Zacharias Kunuk's 2001 Inuktitut-language feature Atanarjuat: The Fast Runner.

She co-founded Hamilton-Mehta Productions, with her husband, producer David Hamilton in 1996. She was awarded a Genie Award in 2003 for the screenplay of Bollywood/Hollywood. In May 2012, Mehta received the Governor General's Performing Arts Award for Lifetime Artistic Achievement, Canada's highest honor in the performing arts.

Mehta was born in Amritsar, Punjab near the militarized border of Pakistan and experienced firsthand the impacts brought forth by the Partition of India. She describes learning about warfare from citizens of Lahore, stating "Even when I was growing up in Amritsar, we used to go every weekend to Lahore, so I just grew up around people who talked about it incessantly and felt it was one of the most horrific sectarian wars they knew of."

Her family moved to New Delhi while she was still a child, and her father worked as a film distributor. Subsequently, Mehta attended Welham Girls High School, boarding school in Dehradun on the foothills of Himalayas. She graduated from the Lady Shri Ram College for Women, University of Delhi with a degree in Philosophy.

Mehta notes how her reception to film transformed and changed as she got older and was exposed to different types of cinema, which ultimately influenced her to become a filmmaker herself. She states:

"When I was growing up in Delhi and I went to university in Delhi, I used to watch [Indian] films. I grew up with a very healthy dose of Indian commercial cinema. My father was a film distributor, so from a very young age I saw commercial Indian cinema. But once I went to university, or even my last year of school, I really started watching and enjoying Satyajit Ray and Ritwik Ghatak and had exposure to non-Hindi cinema and non-Hollywood cinema. At university, I was also exposed to directors like Truffaut and Godard. There was also intense exposure to Japanese cinema. So, Ozu, Mizoguchi."

After graduating Mehta began working for a production company that made documentary and educational films for the Indian government. During the production of her first feature-length documentary focusing on the working life of a child bride, she met and married Canadian documentary filmmaker Paul Saltzman, who was in India making a film. She migrated to Toronto to live with her husband in 1973, and was credited in some of her early films as Deepa Saltzman.