Tina Gharavi
Tina Gharavi is an Iranian-born British artist, director and screenwriter. Her 2013 debut feature I Am Nasrine was nominated for a BAFTA award. Her projects explore themes of outsiders, rebels and misfits.
Early life and education
Gharavi was born in Tehran. She attended high school in MiddletownNew 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. She later studied near Lille in Northern France at Le Fresnoy, studio national des arts contemporainsCareer
Her directorial debut, Closer, is a 35mm experimental documentary which premiered at Sundance 2001 won the PlantOut Grand Prize at Outfest in LA. 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. 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.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. Sir Ben Kingsley, a patron of the film, called it "an important and much-needed film". Peter Bradshaw of The Guardian gave the film four stars, writing that it was "a valuable debut, shot with a fluent kind of poetry".
In April 2023, Gharavi addressed criticism regarding the casting of mix-race actress Adele James as Cleopatra in the Netflix series Queen Cleopatra, which she directed, distributed by Netflix and produced by Jada Pinkettt Smith's Westbrook Studios. 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. 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.
Gharavi is a Reader in Film & Digital Media at the University of Newcastle, 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. She was invited to join the BAFTA Academy in 2017 and received a Fellowship from the MIT Documentary Lab in Boston, where she is working on her next feature project in collaboration with Film4, The Good Iranian.