Conference 2009 - Speakers

Banafsheh Akhlaghi is the Western Regional Director of Amnesty International leading Thirteen States for its USA section. In 2004, Ms. Akhlaghi founded the National Legal Sanctuary for Community Advancement, a non-profit organization dedicated to ensuring the human rights and dignity of Middle Eastern, Muslim, and South Asian peoples, which emerged as one of the lead advocates of human rights for these communities, representing over 3000 people to date. Prior to practicing law, Ms. Akhlaghi was a professor of Constitutional Law at the John F. Kennedy School. In 2001, Ms. Akhlaghi gave up her teaching position to create Akhlaghi & Associates, a private practice specializing in immigration and civil rights post 9/11. In 2005, Ms. Akhlaghi was retained as a consultant to the United Nations Development Fund for Women, and has testified before the United States Congress on numerous occasions. Ms. Akhlaghi received her B.A. from the University of San Francisco, with attendance at Cambridge University, and her Juris Doctorate from Tulane University.

Donya Alinejad
My interest in migrant nationalism and new media developed during my undergraduate and graduate studies in social sciences, in which I specialized in anthropology. My own experience with migration and cultural differences may have shaped my interests. I was born in Tehran, grew up in Sydney, Australia, and finally lived in the Netherlands for the past ten years, studying at various institutions, including the Vrije Universiteit, where I am now based at the department of Social and Cultural Anthropology. I am currently in the early stages of my doctoral research project concerning Iranian diaspora identities and Internet media usage. Certainly my own background has directed my interest towards the Iranian diaspora in particular, but this interest is also based on the exciting possibilities I see around the second generation's usage of Internet in creating, imagining, and enacting connections to Iran and within the diaspora, whether locally, nationally, or internationally.

Taghi Amirani
Born in Iran. Grows up a bit, but not enough. Takes pictures. Goes to the pictures. Likes making images, telling stories. You get the picture. Goes to England for a couple of months to learn English. Decides to stay. Parents unhappy, but hey, what can you do? School subjects, sciences. University subject, physics. Decides to make a documentary about black holes instead of doing a physics project. Faculty unhappy, but hey...Gets good degree. "Shades of Black" a hit at all black hole events. Goes to film school. Makes romantic silent comedy "Mechanic of Love". Gets a job in TV researching school programmes on design and technology. First pay cheque creates premature sense of growing up. Gets TV directing break on a film about amateur astronomers. Critics love it. Goes to on to make 36 more films. Becomes TED Fellow in 2009. Still growing up. See below links for more.

Rudi Bakhtiar currently holds the position of Director of Public Relations for the Public Affairs Alliance of Iranian Americans. In this role, Rudi is using her decade of experience in television news to help PAAIA present a more positive and accurate image of Iranian Americans to the American public. Previously, Rudi worked as an international reporter for Fox News, covering a variety of hot button news stories, such as the Iran-Iraq summit in Tehran in 2006, as well as the 2006 Midterm elections in Washington D.C. As a reporter for CNN, Rudi covered conflicts in Rwanda, Ethiopia, South Africa, Israel and Palestine. The first show Rudi anchored for CNN, called CNN Newsroom, was nominated for an Emmy award that year for its coverage of the Bosnian War. In 2002, Rudi was promoted to lead news anchor for CNN Headline News' late show Headline News Tonight, and anchored the network's coverage of Operation Enduring Freedom as well as Operation Iraqi Freedom in the Spring of 2003. Rudi also anchored various shows on CNN, including Anderson Cooper 360, and was on the air live during the terrorist attacks of September 11th. Born in California, Rudi moved to Iran at the age of five where she lived until 17 when she came back to the U.S. and earned a Bachelor's Degree in Biology from the University of California, Los Angeles.

Gelareh Bassiry is a substance abuse and mental health counselor affiliated with DSVS (Domestic and Sexual Violence Services) and ADAPT (Anger and Domestic Abuse Prevention and Treatment) working with at risk youth, victimized women, and the perpetrators in Fairfax County, Virginia. Ms. Bassiry also serves on the boards of the Ethnic Social Referral Services. In her free time, Ms. Bassiry is the host and producer of the Khaleh Gili talk show at Fairfax Public Access that works to foster discussion about fami ly issues in the Iranian-American community for the past ten years.

Jasmin Darznik received her Ph.D. in English from Princeton University and is currently a Steinbeck Fellow in Creative Writing. "Writing Outside the Veil", her doctoral dissertation, was the first-full length scholarly study of writing by Iranian American women writers. Articles and interviews drawn from this project have been published or are forthcoming in the Journal of Multi-Ethnic Literature of the United States, The Journal of Middle Eastern Women's Studies, and The Women's Review of Books. In addition to her scholarly writing, she is also an award-winning short story writer and essayist and has contributed to the Los Angles Times, The Washington Post, San Francisco Chronicle, and others. The Good Daughter, the story of four generations of her family in Iran and America, will be published next year. This fall, Dr. Darznik will join the English department at Washington and Lee University, where she will teach 20th century American literature.

Nina Farnia is in her final year of graduate school at UCLA, pursuing a JD in law and an MA in urban planning with a specialization in Critical Race Studies. Before attending graduate school, she worked as a commmunity organizer at the Southwest Youth Collaborative and the Arab American Action Network, organizing youth to challenge the Chicago Police Department's practice of racial profiling and police brutality. She has worked as a summer associate with Shirin Ebadi, Nobel Peace Prize Laureate, in Tehran, Iran, and at Hadsell Stormer, a civil rights firm in Pasadena. She is a recipient of the 2009-2011 Equal Justice Works fellowship, through which she will be doing post-9/11 racial profiling class action litigation and organizing at the Impact Fund in Berkeley. After the fellowship, she hopes to pursue a career teaching law. She graduated from the University of Chicago in 2002 with a BA in Political Science, and was born and raised in Oklahoma.

Morad Ghorban currently holds the position of Legislative Director at PAAIA and serves as the organization's primary liaison to national, state, and local legislatures. From 2003 to 2008, Morad served as the Political Director of the Iranian American Political Action Committee (IAPAC) As Political Director of IAPAC, Morad directed and implemented the organization's electoral program. He led IAPAC to perform in the top 20% of all PACs based on contributions received during the 2004 & 2006 election cycle and collaborated with members of Congress to draft a bipartisan resolution declaring Congress' condemnation of discrimination against Iranian Americans. Prior to joining IAPAC, Morad served on the staff of U.S. Representative John Linder from 1995 to 2000. Morad earned his Bachelor's degree in Political Science at Tulane University. In June 2002, he earned his Master's degree in International Studies and Diplomacy at the School of Oriental and African Studies, University of London.

Babak Hoghooghi joined PAAIA as the organization's Executive Director at the time of its inception in 2007. Prior to joining PAAIA, Babak was an attorney practicing at the law firm of Skadden, Arps, Slate, Meagher & Flom LLP, from 1994 to 2006. As a member of the Energy and Project Finance Group in the firm's Washington D.C. office, Babak's transactional practice focused on the development, financing and acquisition of international and domestic power projects. He is admitted to the bar in New York and the District of Columbia. Mr. Hoghooghi earned his law degree in 1994 at the Georgetown University Law Center. Before entering law school, he received a Master of Science degree in Structural Engineering from the University of California at Berkeley in 1987. Babak is a founder of The Iranian American Bar Association, and acted as the organization's elected President and Board Member from 2001 to June 2005. Mr. Hoghooghi was also one of the founding trustees of the Iranian American Political Action Committee, and acted as an elected member of its Board of Directors and Executive Committee until January 2005.

Afsaneh Kalantary received her PhD in Cultural Anthropology from the University of California at Santa Cruz where she has worked as a lecturer. As a Fulbright scholar, she conducted her ethnographic fieldwork with Iranian exiles in Berlin, Germany. Her dissertation is entitled: "Exilic Yearnings and Diasporic Homes: An Ethnography of Memory, Place, Race and Gender among Iranian Exiles in Berlin, Germany." Her scholarly interests and writing, which span a broad range of topics, bridge the social sciences with humanities. In her work, she explores the construction of diasporic communities which maintain continuous cultural exchange and contact with their "homeland." She also examines the intersections of race, ethnicity and gender with other dimensions of difference.

For nearly a decade Mahdis Keshavarz has worked at the forefront of groundbreaking human rights issues. She has placed thousands of news stories and op-eds with various media outlets - including The New York Times, The Washington Post, CNN, BBC, The Village Voice, and Al Jazeera - on behalf of her clients. Her client roster includes international dignitaries, Hollywood stars and numerous film festivals and events focusing on the Middle East community for both a domestic and an international audience. An accomplished advocate of human rights and social justice issues, Keshavarz has written for the online magazine Slate and has appeared as a commentator on BBC and Democracy Now!. She serves on the advisory board for the Arab and Middle Eastern Journalists Association, the Center for Social Inclusion, and the Alston Bannerman Fellowship Program.

Hooman Khalili has been part of the #1 morning radio show in the San Francsico Bay Area for the past 9 years on Alice Radio @ 97.3 1 year ago Hooman launched a YOUTUBE channel with 106 videos, which has garnered 19 million views in that time. He recently launched his own company called RIVERCAVE that helps companies virally market their messages using the internet. Under the RIVERCAVE umbrella Hooman and his team created the #1 video in the world to get the Youth of America to vote in the 2008 election. The video recieved 5.1 million views on YOUTUBE making the #40 All time most viewed political video on YOUTUBE Hooman was also in the PIXAR movie CARS and PARAMOUNT feature film CLOVERFIELD In his free time Hooman goes to the Opera, does Bikram Yoga and loves watching cartoons.

Ahmad Kiarostami has worked in cinema and software industries for more than fifteen years. After taking on leadership roles at Microsoft Middle East, he founded three companies including the first multimedia and online production venue in Iran, where he published award-winning multimedia products in cinema and visual arts. He also served as an advisory member of the Iranian National Graphics Society. Ahmad was a member of several national software standard committees, and developed the first full-text search technology for Persian content which was adopted by different products and online newspapers. He founded Persopedia.com, which is now becoming the basis for a massive data archiving project about Iran at Stanford University. Ahmad has made short films and has worked at different roles on film projects with well-known Iranian directors including Bahram Beyzaie and Ramin Bahrani. He has initiated and contributed to several film and cultural initiatives, including a new online section for San Francisco International Film Festival. Ahmad has studied Math and Computer Science at Sharif University, Industrial Engineering at Azad University, and Philosophy at UCLA. He's currently the Director of Desktop Applications at LiteScape Technologies in Northern California.

Mazyar Lotfalian is an anthropologist who has taught courses and conducted research on Islam, science, and media at Yale, University of Pittsburgh and NYU. His first book, Islam, Technoscientific Identities, and the Culture of Curiosity, is on the relationship between Islam and the world of science. He has conducted ethnographic research among Muslims in the US, Iran, Turkey, and Malaysia. He is working on a new book on aesthetics and politics and the artistic production in the realm of visual culture in Iran and its diaspora. He lives in Silicon Valley.

Neda Maghbouleh is a UC Regents Special Fellow and National Science Foundation (NSF) Teaching Fellow in Year 3 of a PhD program in Sociology with a dual emphasis in Race/Ethnicity/Nation (REN) and Culture at UC Santa Barbara. She is writing her dissertation on Iranian-American identities and completed an M.A. thesis (2008) on Persian-language popular music in the US. Neda is from Portland, OR and graduated from Smith College in 2004.

Arash Majdi is the current Director of IAAB's Camp Ayandeh. In the past, Mr. Majdi has held Associate and Counselor positions at Camp Ayandeh. Mr. Majdi is interested in youth development and youth leadership and believes Camp Ayandeh is able to provide these needs to the Iranian-American community. Mr. Majdi is a graduate student at Georgia Institute of Technology pursuing a degree in Operations Research. Before going back to school, Mr. Majdi worked at GE-Energy as an Optimizer. He received his BS in Industrial Engineering from Georgia Tech.

Amy Malek is a graduate student of sociocultural anthropology at the University of California, Los Angeles (UCLA). Ms. Malek is particularly interested in visual culture, media, and the negotiation of diasporic identities through cultural production in Iran and the Iranian diaspora. She graduated with highest honors from Emory University with a B.A. in Middle Eastern Studies and International Studies, and received her M.A. from New York University's Program for Near Eastern Studies after completing her thesis on Iranian diaspora women's memoirs, focusing on Marjane Satrapi's Persepolis graphic novels. Her current research examines public performances and representations of Iranian-American diaspora identity, taking the New York Persian Parade and Orange County Mehregan Festivals as case studies.

Amin Moghadam was born in Tehran in 1982. Upon completing a bachelor and a Master degrees in sociology and anthropology in Paris V university, he studied a post-master of geography, urban and regional planning in both Ecole nationale des Ponts et Chaussées, Paristech, and Paris IV university. He is also a documentary film essayist and made a movie called "Le souffle d'allegresse" which has been screened in several film festivals in France. He is currently PHD Candidate in Geography of developing countries in Paris-Diderot VII University. His subject of thesis is "The metropolization process in Persian Gulf" and works specifically on migratory trends.

Michelle Moghtader, the Director of Community Outreach, joined the NIAC team after having worked for the Barack Obama Campaign for Change. As a Field Organizer in Virginia, she empowered volunteers, led efforts to register voters and implemented a Get Out the Vote strategy which helped turn a historically red state blue.

Ms. Moghtader received her B.A. from the University of Virginia where she majored in Foreign Affairs and French. At the University of Virginia, she was active in the Iranian student community and served as President of the Persian Cultural Society, organizing events to celebrate and spread Persian culture. After graduating she moved to France to teach English to high school students to increase the awareness of American society. Through her work at NIAC, she hopes to do the same of Iranian culture by civically empowering the Iranian-American community.

Marjan Moinzadeh is a licensed clinical psychologist currently practicing in Northern California. Prior to pursuing her PhD she received her MA focusing on marriage and family therapy. Her clinical experience includes doing psychotherapy, assessment, and consultation with all age groups for more than a decade in USA and for a brief period in Iran. Her research experience includes issues related to ethnic and cultural identity and trauma and being psychiatry and clinical research coordinator at National Center for PTSD in Veteran Administrations. She has also been a clinical supervisor and has taught graduate level students during the years of her postdoctoral fellowship. Her creative and scholarly interests are based on an integral approach of psychology which is structured on Western schools of thought and empirical research findings and Eastern philosophy. She is interested in life span development in relationship with culture and society and how through each developmental stage the individuals define, accept, express, and reflect self within their own cultural and societal system and how a disruption in the system like a traumatic event may impact on the personal growth and the consciousness of an individual.

Vahideddin Namazi was born in Tehran in 1961 and finished the last three years of primary school in one year. After having completed high school, he started university at age 16. Due to the closing of universities in Iran after the Revolution, he graduated from University of Allameh Tabatabai in 1984 with a BA in Economics. He finished his Masters in Economics at the University of Tehran in 1989. Before coming to Canada, he worked as an Economist in different parts of the Iranian government and Central Bank. He also taught Economics in the universities of Shahid Beheshti (Melli) and Azad. In Canada, he studied Sociology in Laval University and is currently writing his PhD thesis in the doctoral program of Applied Human Sciences in University of Montreal. Completing his research in Interuniversity Research Center on Science and Technology (CIRST), he is working on the professional integration of Iranian immigrants in Canada.

Sanaz Raji is a PhD candidate at the Institute of Communication Studies, University of Leeds, examining the dynamics of subversive humor on the Internet created by second generation Iranians in the Diaspora as a larger discourse on the dynamics of being hyphenated Iranian in a post-September 11th context. She has presented her findings concerning the Iranian Diaspora at the London School of Economics (LSE), Sussex University, University of Manchester, Wolfson College, Oxford University, among others. Currently, she is finishing a chapter about the Iranian Diaspora for Zed Press. Sanaz Raji and Shahrzad M. Davis have collaborated on a paper about the Queer Iranian Diaspora and are in the process of working on a forthcoming film project. Sanaz Raji is currently a working on a research project funded by the European Commission, entitled, Media and Citizenship: Transnational Television Cultures Reshaping Political Identities in the European Union. Sanaz Raji also co-edits an educational blog funded by the AHRC on themes such as migration, identity, and diaspora issues, called Inter-sections, http://intersections.wordpress.com.

Fared Shafinury is an Texas born Iranian-American singer-song writer and setar player living in Tehran, Iran and Austin. Shafinury's music combines Persian Classical techniques with American indie rock, jazz and blues sensibilities. Although primarily self-taught in the setar , santur and the vocal repertoire, known as the radiff, Shafinury has had the good fortune of studying under some of Iran's most prominent Masters including: Ostad Mozaffari, Ostad Zolghadr, Ostad Shaari, Ostad Soukuti and Ostad Mohammad Reza Lotfi. In 2006, after graduating with a Bachelors in Political Science from University of Texas, Shafinury moved to Tehran to concentrate full time on his craft. While in Iran he worked with some of Iran's most prominent young musicians, film makers, artists and writers. Shafinury also became a contributing music reviewer for the online arts magazine Tehran Avenue. In 2008, Shafinury recorded a self released EP, Tehranosaurus, and his forth-coming début full length, Behind the Seas, at Avaye Darya studios in Tehran.

Azadeh Shahshahani is the Director of the National Security/Immigrants' Rights Project at the ACLU of Georgia. Before her move to Atlanta, she worked with the ACLU of North Carolina as Muslim/Middle Eastern Community Outreach Coordinator. In that capacity, she initiated a statewide campaign against racial profiling; coordinated a Continuing Legal Education seminar to train attorneys to represent Muslim and Middle Eastern clients facing human rights violations; and helped lead a statewide campaign calling for the investigation of a North Carolina-based air carrier which has transported foreign nationals to tortu re and detention. Azadeh is a graduate of the University of Michigan Law School, where she was a participant in the Third Colloquium on Challenges in International Refugee Law. While in law school, Azadeh completed a fellowship with the United Nations High Commissioner for Refugees in Washington, DC; a research fellowship with a women's rights organization in Iran; as well as an internship with an immigrants' rights organization in Los Angeles. She was born in Iran and moved to the United States at age sixteen.

Nahid Siamdoust is a doctoral candidate in Modern Middle Eastern Studies at St. Antony's College, Oxford University. She holds a B.A. in Political Science and Art History from Barnard College, and a Master's in International Affairs from Columbia University. Before returning to academia, Nahid worked as Iran correspondent for TIME Magazine and The Los Angeles Times, and last joined Al Jazeera English in 2006 to work on the channel's global launch out of Doha, Qatar. Her thesis examines the field of music production in post-revolutionary Iran. She continues to write for TIME and other publications.

Abdi Soltani is the volunteer chair of the Education Committee of PARSA Community Foundation, which encourages and supports philanthropy and volunteerism in the Iranian-American community. Previously, Abdi served as the Executive Director of PARSA Community Foundation. He currently serves as the Executive Director of the ACLU of Northern California, which works to advance civil liberties and civil rights. Abdi served as the first Executive Director of the Campaign for College Opportunity, where he worked with business and community groups to develop policy solutions to ensure access to college for all young people in California, and of Californians for Justice, a grassroots organization mobilizing communities for immigrant rights, civil rights and equal educational opportunity. Abdi received his Bachelor's degree at Stanford University.

Leili Sreberny-Mohammadi received a Bachelors of Social Science in Social Anthropology from The University of Manchester in 2003. She has a background in the arts and broadcasting having worked with British broadcasters Channel 4 and the BBC and as a contemporary arts events producer at London’s South Bank Centre. Since November 2007 Leili has lived both in Isfahan and Tehran working on her Persian language and literature skills, while acting as a research consultant on the AHRC funded ‘Diasporas: Tuning In’ project examining the listening and viewing habits of Tehrani residents. Leili is currently programming a film programme for the ‘30 Years On: The Social and Cultural Impacts of the Iranian Revolution’ conference to be held at SOAS this June. She is hoping to begin her Masters in Migration and Diaspora Studies in the autumn. Leili’s interests lie in identity politics, mixedness, and Iranian contemporary cultural production.

Mansour Taeed came to US at the age of 16. He received his BS and MS in physics from UC Berkeley and because he resembled Einstein a bit, he went to Colombia University to further his studies. There he realized that he does not need a PhD in physics to pursue theater! He started acting in 1982 and he was one of the founding members of Darvag in 1985. He has written, directed and acted in more than 40 plays. His most recent work is 10 seconds of acting in the movie "Kite Runner"! He is currently the artistic director of Javane, the young Iranian/American theater company in Berkeley.

John Tehranian is an attorney, academic and author. He is a partner at Turner Green LLP, an entertainment and intellectual property litigation firm in Southern California, and is a tenured Professor of Law at Chapman University, School of Law. He has previously served as Professor of Law at the University of Utah, S.J. Quinney College of Law, and as Visiting Professor of Law at Loyola Law School. A graduate of Harvard University and Yale Law School, he is the author of numerous works on the interface between law and culture, with a particular focus on issues of intellectual property, entertainment, civil rights and race. He is the author of the book Whitewashed: America's Invisible Middle Eastern Minority (New York University Press, 2008), an analysis of the social and legal construction of race, and the forthcoming book Infringement Nation (Oxford University Press, 2010), an examination of copyright law in the digital age.

Mina Trudeau is Director of Al-Fatiha, the national organization dedicated to Muslims of all cultural and belief traditions who are lesbian, gay, bisexual, transgender, intersex, queer and questioning or exploring their sexual orientation and/or gender identity (LGBTIQQ), and their families, their friends and their allies. An educator and organizer with 20 years of experience at the intersection of gender rights, gender-based violence and human rights, Mina serves on the Management Circle of SisterSong Women of Color Reproductive Justice Collective, and serves as a consultant and trainer to U.S.-based human rights and social justice organizations.

Hanif Yazdi was born and raised in Texas and spent many childhood summers in Iran. This past winter, he spent twenty days in Tehran speaking to activists, lawyers, professionals and students as well as observing ways in which Muharram rituals were conducted. Currently a fourth year undergraduate in history and philosophy at the College of Willi am and Mary, he has a keen interest in social developments in Iran and is applying for a grant to study the situation of Afghan refugees living in the country. Hanif is fluent in Arabic and Persian and is studying Urdu.