Actor · Filmmaker · Writer · Author · Storyteller
I’ve lived many lives.
The thread through every one of them is story. Story as language, as sound, as image, as memory. And lately, the thin and strange space between what we imagine and what becomes real.
I.
I grew up surrounded by the unseen.
Born in Tehran, in a home where art and spirit were the same thing. 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 shape to what couldn’t be said out loud.
Incense and turmeric in the air. Mantras in the walls. Long trips to India, where temple bells, street music and ritual became my first vocabulary.
The visible world is only part of the story. I’ve spent my life investigating the rest.
II.
I became a collector of stories.
Back in Iran, my grandmother took me to see a friend she’d known for fifty years. Room by room, the woman showed me what she had gathered over a lifetime: an object from one country, a photograph, a small strange thing that would mean nothing to anyone else.
I wasn’t looking at a collection. I was looking at a life. A room had become an archive.
Everything has a story behind it. I’m always wondering what it is.
IV.
So I make things.
I’ve never been good at staying in one medium. I’ve hosted a podcast that reached millions, DJed live radio, studied sound at Berklee, composed music from the bioelectric signals of plants, built brands, and written a book.
I used to think those were separate chapters. They were all teaching me the same thing: there are a thousand ways to tell a story.
I stopped choosing a lane a long time ago.
Where to find me now
Magic Inclined is where all of it lives: the book, the courses, the music and the live events. Come wander.
III.
Then the world changed.
We emigrated to America, and the symmetry of my childhood broke. Suburbia. Fluorescent light. A new language, a new culture, a new kind of noise.
When everything around you changes, you notice how much of who you are was built. What survives? What gets rewritten? What do you make because you need it?