Biography

Hisham Bizri is a Lebanese-born American film director, writer, and producer. He started working in film as an assistant director to Raúl Ruiz in NYC and to Miklós Jancsó in Budapest.

Bizri has directed 29 short films and has written a number of screenplays adapted from Gilgamesh, Jorge Luis Borges, Fyodor Dostoevsky, Al-Tayyib Salih, and James Joyce. In 2021, he directed "Elektra," his first feature film which he also wrote and co-produced with Mirna Shbaro in Beirut.

Bizri studied filmmaking at Boston, Harvard, and Chicago and taught at MIT, NYU, the University of Chicago, UC Davis, Boston, and the University of Minnesota, as well as in Lebanon, Korea, Japan, Ireland, France, and Jordan where he founded a number of filmmaking programs. Most recently, he has served as a tenured Professor of Film Directing and Screenwriting at Brown University in Rhode Island.

Bizri's work has been shown in international venues including Sundance, Beirut, Oberhausen, Tribeca, VideoEx, Mizna, Montpelier, Athens, San Francisco, Pesaro, Moscow, Ismailia, 25FPS Croatia, Brussels Palais des Beaux-Arts, and Abu Dhabi film festivals. He also exhibited at the Louvre, Institut du Monde Arabe, Cinémathèque Française, Centre Pompidou, MoMa, Haus der Kulturen der Welt, Jeu de Paume, Tokyo Museum of Contemporary Art, Harvard and Anthology Film Archives (NY), among others.

Bizri is recipient of awards such as the McKnight, Salomon, LEF, Jerome, Bogliasco, Rockefeller, Ford, Guggenheim, Cairo International Film Festival Special Jury Prize for best screenplay, and the Rome Prize from the American Academy. In 2017, he was awarded The Andrei Tarkovsky Prize for best director.

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

In 2019, he founded Mimera Films, his own film practice studio. Bizri is currently living between Paris, Berlin, and Manhattan.

- IMDb mini biography by: Hisham Bizri