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Mohammad Gorjestani

He // Him // His

Filmmaker and Artist

San Francisco, California

Mohammad, an Iranian-born man wearing a black t-shirt and baseball cap, sits in a barbershop chair.

Photo by Elygoat

Mohammad Gorjestani is a director, photographer, multidisciplinary artist, and founder of award-winning creative studio and production company Even/Odd. His work exists between fiction and non-fiction forms with an aesthetic and perspective emerging from the community and cultures that raised him as a first-generation immigrant from Iran growing up in public housing in the Bay Area. In 2014, his prescient near-future short Refuge placed him on Filmmaker Magazine's 25 New Faces of Independent Film after a festival run that included SXSW and Tribeca. In 2018, his film Sister Hearts premiered at SXSW and earned the X Award at the Tribeca Film Festival, a Cinema Eye Nomination, and a Webby. His acclaimed short Exit 12 won the Jury Prize at SXSW, Camden International Film Festival, and seven other Oscar-qualifying festivals; earned Video of the Year at the Vimeo Awards; and was acquired by Searchlight. He has earned twelve Vimeo Staff Picks and six Webby Awards and has been featured by outlets including The New York Times, Vogue, and The New Yorker. He is also the artist behind 1-800 Happy Birthday, an installation project featuring phone booths-turned-memorials of birthday voicemails left for the victims of police killings. Gorjestani is a founding partner of The Adachi Project, a first-of-its-kind storytelling project with the San Francisco Public Defender's Office.

Donor -The Rainin Arts Fellowship is supported by the Kenneth Rainin Foundation.

This artist page was last updated on: 09.05.2024

Refuge (trailer) by Mohammad Gorjestani, 2014. Digital video, 23 minutes.

Somewhere Higher by Mohammad Gorjestani, 2022. Digital and 35mm film, 22 minutes. Presented by Nowness.

Exit 12 by Mohammad Gorjestani, 2019. Digital and 16mm film, 23 minutes.