Liguria, Italy (2019)

Hisham Bizri is a Lebanese-born American film director, writer, and producer. He began his career in cinema working as an assistant director to Raúl Ruiz in New York City and to Miklós Jancsó in Budapest.

Bizri has directed 29 short films and written numerous screenplays, with adaptations drawn from sources as diverse as The Epic of Gilgamesh, Jorge Luis Borges, Fyodor Dostoevsky, Al-Tayyib Salih, and James Joyce. In 2023, he released Elektra, his first dramatic feature film, which he wrote and co-produced with Mirna Shbaro in Beirut. The film is currently available on Netflix, Apple TV+, and Google Play.

He studied filmmaking at Boston, Harvard, and Chicago universities, and has taught at institutions including MIT, NYU, the University of Chicago, UC Davis, Boston University, and the University of Minnesota. His teaching career also spans Lebanon, Korea, Japan, Ireland, France, and Jordan, where he established several film programs. Most recently, he has served as a tenured Professor of Film Directing and Screenwriting at Brown University.

Bizri’s films have been showcased at major international festivals such as Sundance, Tribeca, Cannes (Short Film Corner), Oberhausen, Valencia, Paris, Beirut, Athens, San Francisco, Los Angeles, Moscow, and Abu Dhabi, among many others. His work has also been screened at premier cultural institutions including the Louvre, MoMA, Cinémathèque Française, Centre Pompidou, Institut du Monde Arabe, and the Tokyo Museum of Contemporary Art. Retrospectives of his work have been held in Boston, Minneapolis, at Harvard, and the Anthology Film Archives in New York.

His accolades include fellowships and awards from the Guggenheim, McKnight, Rockefeller, Ford, Salomon Fund, LEF, Jerome, and Bogliasco foundations. He received the Special Jury Prize for Best Screenplay at the Cairo International Film Festival and the Andrei Tarkovsky Prize for Best Director in Chicago (2017). In 2005, he was awarded the prestigious Rome Prize from the American Academy in Rome.

In 2005, Bizri co-founded The Arab Institute of Film in Jordan alongside the late Syrian filmmaker Omar Amiralay and Danish producer Jakob Høgel, with support from International Media Support (Copenhagen) and the Ford Foundation (New York). He has also served as Producer at Future TV (Beirut), Creative Director at Orbit Communications Company (Rome), and President & Creative Director of Levantine Films (New York).

In 2019, he founded Mimera Films, his personal film practice studio. Bizri currently divides his time between Paris, Berlin, and Manhattan.