Tina Gharavi

Gharavi was born in Tehran, Iran. She attended high school in Middletown, New Jersey. She initially trained as a painter in the United States before an on-set experience for a Hollywood production prompted her to pursue a career in the film industry.^[2][3] She later studied near Lille in northern France at Le Fresnoy, studio national des arts contemporains.^[4]

Her directorial debut, Closer, is a 35mm experimental documentary which premiered at Sundance 2001 won the PlantOut Grand Prize at Outfest in LA.^[5] Her following documentary, Mother/Country, which chronicled her return to her mother’s house in Iran 23 years after the Islamic Revolution, was broadcast in the UK on Channel Four TV.^[6] In 2010, she was chosen as one of nine emerging directors to be mentored as part of the UK Film Council’s Guiding Lights scheme.^[7]

In 2011, Gharavi directed two episodes of The Tunnel, the British adaptation of The Bridge for Sky, as well as two episodes of Ackley Bridge for Channel 4. Her debut feature film, I Am Nasrine, was released in 2013. It was nominated for a BAFTA for outstanding debut.^[8] Sir Ben Kingsley, a patron of the film,^[9][10] called it "an important and much-needed film".^[11] Peter Bradshaw of The Guardian gave the film four stars, writing that it was "a valuable debut, shot with a fluent kind of poetry".^[8]

In April 2023, Gharavi addressed criticism regarding the casting of mix-race actress Adele James as Cleopatra in the Netflix series Queen Cleopatra,^[12] which she directed, distributed by Netflix and produced by Jada Pinkettt Smith's Westbrook Studios.^[13] In 2024, Gharavi was announced as the director of The Shah, the Spy and the Madman, a documentary series on the 1953 coup d'état in Iran.^[14] In December of that year, Gharavi was announced as the showrunner for The Fox, an international crime thriller series based on the bestselling Icelandic detective novels by Sólveig Pálsdóttir.^[15]

Gharavi is a Reader in Film & Digital Media at the University of Newcastle,^[16] where she completed her PhD, Narrative Cannibals: Whose Story Is It Anyway? The Politics of Representation and the Veracity of the Image in the Age of Digital Storytelling.^[17][18] She was invited to join the BAFTA Academy in 2017 and received a Fellowship from the MIT Documentary Lab in Boston,^[19] where she is working on her next feature project, The Good Iranian, in collaboration with Film4.^[20]

In 1998, Gharavi established the film company Bridge +Tunnel Productions, a multidisciplinary media production company. The company uses cinema and storytelling to highlight underrepresented stories from minority and marginalized communities.^[21]