At 29, screenwriter and director Anahita Ghazvinizadeh recently débuted her first feature film, They, around the world to critical acclaim.

Now, she finds herself in a new Midwestern home, spreading her unique wealth of experiences and knowledge to the University of Iowa community as an assistant professor of cinema.

“In my filmmaking process, the writing process is really significant,” Ghazvinizadeh said. “So when I heard about this position centered on film production in a location with a rich writing culture, I figured that’s exactly the fields that would help with my own practice as a filmmaker.”

She teaches screenwriting courses in the undergraduate program. However, writing for film has not always been her top area of interest. Born and raised in Iran, at a young age Ghazvinizadeh spent much of her time wandering through literature, short stories being her favorite aspect of prose.

She said that because her mother did not allow participation in sports, she focused her interest in other areas, such as stories related to the performing arts that ignited a passion for theater production. For Ghazvinizadeh, the passion was not something she initially envisioned a career in because she comes from a family fixated on the sciences rather than the arts. 

“I was raised in a family that really valued literature, but at the same time, it was kind of expected of me to become a scientist, with my sister later becoming a physicist and my dad as a pharmacist,” Ghazvinizadeh said.  “By the end of high school, I was supposed to take an exam for physics or math, but I felt this urge to study film. So my path was in my hands, I chose it, but there were some decisions that magically appeared on my way that were so strong I could not resist this love for storytelling.”

After completing school at the Tehran University of Art, she ventured to Chicago in pursuit of an M.F.A. in studio arts from the School of Arts Institute. Because of uneasy relations between her home country of Iran and the United States, travel back and forth was a complicated, uneasy matter. So instead, she decided to nix her initial idea of directing her short “Needle” at home and start over in Chicago.

She said the process was about as unconventional as anything she had yet to make, and as a result, the short unexpectedly received critical praise around the globe, winning the First Cinéfondation Award at Cannes Film Festival and the Silver Hugo at Chicago International Film Festival.

“The process was weird because I made a film in English with English-speaking actors after six months of being in the U.S., when I was completely an outsider observing the culture,” Ghazvinizadeh said. “But there is something about doing something unknown that is really fresh, which is what I want to share with my students, that idea of starting in that place of not knowing exactly what you are doing and trusting your intuitive decisions.”

Ghazvinizadeh said the festival experience was surreal, something that was so outside of her range of expectations when working on “Needle.” A lot of good came out of attending the festival — she was able to meet and grow a strong connection with her mentor, director Jane Campion, and in that process, she met a plethora of new people open for collaboration and discussion.

That being said, Ghazvinizadeh said festivals can be a filmmaker’s own worst enemy by bogging down true artistic intent and forcing filmmakers to produce content that jibes with what the festivals and production companies demand at the time.

Now, after close to a decade of exposure, success, and self-discovery, Ghazvinizadeh nomadically resides in Iowa City, hoping to assist students in finding their storytelling voices and also journey on the path of unexpected sequences and storytelling growth she’s been on since choosing a career of film back in Iran.