exploring life like it’s my job>>
actor ・ filmmaker ・ writer ・ author ・ storyteller
I’ve lived many lives, but the thread that runs through all of them is story.
Story as language. Story as sound. Story as image. Story as memory.
And, increasingly, I’ve become fascinated by something else:
the strange space between what we imagine and what becomes real.
I grew up surrounded by the unseen.
I was born in Tehran, in a home where art and spirit were inseparable.
My father was the pujari of the city's only Hindu temple, a quiet revolutionary in saffron robes. My mother was a painter who gave form to things that couldn't always be said.
Our home moved to an ancient rhythm.
Incense and turmeric in the air. Mantras in the walls. Paintings everywhere. Stories about gods, people, places, and worlds I couldn't see but somehow understood were there.
We traveled often to India, where bells, chants, street music, color, ritual, and mythology became part of my earliest vocabulary.
Long before I knew words like filmmaking, consciousness, or storytelling, I understood something intuitively:
The visible world is only part of the story.
And I've probably spent the rest of my life investigating the rest of it.
I became a collector of stories.
Years later, I was visiting my grandmother in Iran when she took me to the home of one of her oldest friends.
They had known each other for more than fifty years.
Her friend walked me slowly through the house, stopping to show me things she had collected over a lifetime of travel.
An object from one country.
Something small she'd carried home from another.
A photograph.
A piece of art.
A strange little thing that might have meant nothing to anyone else.
But every object had a story.
And as she moved from room to room telling them to me, I realized I wasn't looking at a collection of things.
I was looking at a life.
Memory had attached itself to objects.
People remained inside photographs.
Places continued to exist inside the things we carried home from them.
A room could become an archive.
That afternoon changed something in me.
I've been collecting stories ever since.
Stories hidden inside people. Inside places. Inside music. Inside objects. Inside memories that change depending on who's remembering them.
I think that's also where some of my fascination with mystery began.
Everything has a story behind it.
I'm always wondering what it is.
So I started making things.
I've never been particularly good at staying in one medium.
I've worked in sound, writing, performance, radio, branding, spirituality, and film. I've hosted a podcast that reached millions, DJed live radio, studied sound at Berklee, experimented with composing music from the bioelectric activity of plants, built brands and helped other people tell their stories, and eventually became a published author.
For a long time, I thought these were separate chapters of my life.
Now I understand that they were all teaching me the same thing.
There are a thousand ways to tell a story.
Sometimes it's written.
Sometimes it's heard.
Sometimes it's performed.
Sometimes it's hidden inside an object, a photograph, a frequency, or a room.
I stopped worrying about choosing a lane a long time ago.
I'm much more interested in following an idea into whatever form it wants to take.
Then the world changed.
When we emigrated to America, the symmetry of my childhood ruptured.
Suddenly there was suburbia.
Fluorescent lights.
A new language. A new culture. A new noise.
I had to learn how to exist inside a world that didn't resemble the one that had formed me.
And somewhere in that rupture, reinvention became part of my vocabulary too.
When the world around you changes, you begin to notice how much of identity is constructed.
Who are you when the context changes?
What survives?
What gets rewritten?
What parts of yourself do you carry forward, and what parts do you create because you need them?
I didn't have language for those questions then.
I just knew that creating things gave me somewhere to put them.