Iman K. Zawahry
Directing
Biography
Iman Zawahry is one of the first hijabi American-Muslim filmmakers in the nation. She has worked on numerous films that have played at over 100 venues worldwide. Zawahry has worked as a producer on the feature film Paperback with Moonlight producer, Adele Romanski, and Sundance alum, Adam Bowers. Her short film Tough Crowd won an Emmy Award and qualified her as a finalist in the NBC Comedy Short Cuts to pitch a sitcom with NBC executives. She is the recipient of the coveted Princess Grace Award for her film Undercover and was selected as a Lincoln Center New York Film Festival Artist Academy Fellow in 2015. Zawahry also collaborated with the non-profit Islamic Scholarship Fund to create the first-ever American Muslim film grant where she currently serves as director. Zawahry works to amplify the underrepresented female voice. She wrote and directed her debut feature film, Americanish, with a majority female crew. The film won the Audience Award at CAAMFest in San Francisco. She currently is a professor of film production at the University of Florida.
Known For
A pizza cook who's never left his college town meets the woman of his dreams before finding out there's a huge roadblock to them being together.
Paperback
In Jackson Heights, career-driven sisters Maryam and Sam and their newly-immigrated cousin Ameera must navigate the consistent — and sometimes conflicting — demands of romance, culture, work and family.
Americanish
Gray, an obsessive angsty teenager, must make peace with his struggling family in order to overcome emotional bonds and personal afflictions.
Portrait of a Young Man
As Saamidah, a young Palestinian-American girl, anxiously starts her first day of school, she finds her identity in question when faced with a world map that doesn't include her homeland.