Tina Gharavi ( born 1 July 1972) is an Iranian-born British BAFTA and Sundance nominated artist, director and screenwriter.

Early life and education

Born in Tehran, around the time of Islamic Revolution she moved to the United Kingdom, then New Zealand, and finally New Jersey, United States. Gharavi attended high school in suburban New Jersey, spending part of her life in Red Bank, close to the Jersey Shore. Gharavi initially trained as a painter at the Mason Gross School of the Arts at Rutgers University. She later attended Le Fresnoy studio National des arts contemporains, near Lille, France. She currently splits her time between Newcastle, England, Paris, and Venice Beach, California.

Career

Gharavi is known for her innovative cross-platform stories about rebels, misfits and outsiders as well as people in extraordinary situations. According to The Spectator, Gharavi's work is simultaneously intimate and lyrical, as well as poignant and political. Her debut, I Am Nasrine, was nominated for a BAFTA. Sir Ben Kingsley called it "an important and much-needed film" and Peter Bradshaw of The Guardian gave the film four stars, writing that it was "a valuable debut, shot with a fluent kind of poetry". Gharavi has TV credits to her name, including directing on The Tunnel, the UK equivalent of The Bridge for Sky and Ackley Bridge for Channel 4. She is a showrunner for an Icelandic/British Detective series, Refurinn (The Fox), an adaptation of an Icelandic best-selling detective series by Sólveig Pálsdóttir. Gharavi's award-winning work has been broadcast worldwide on the BBC, Channel 4 (UK), ITV, Showtime, Educational Broadcasting System South Korea, and in the contemporary art world, including multiple screenings at the ICA in London, the BALTIC Centre for Contemporary Art (UK). Her films are housed in the permanent collections of MIT, Museum of Fine Arts Boston, British Film Institute, Harvard University Library, Tyne & Wear Archives, Manchester Art Gallery and the Donnell Library in New York, amongst others. She was awarded a National Endowment for the Arts Fellowship, received a UK Arts Council Decibel Spotlight Award and served as a diversity champion for a variety of organizations (UK Refugee Council, Arts Council North-East, Tyneside Cinema and BALTIC Centre for Contemporary Arts). Gharavi is an associate professor in Film & Digital Media at the University of Newcastle. She was invited to join the BAFTA Academy in 2017 and received a Fellowship from the MIT Documentary Lab in Boston.

Production

Gharavi established the film company, Bridge + Tunnel Productions, based in Newcastle upon Tyne, England in 1998. In 2000, Gharavi set up the Kooch Cinema Group, a media training project, for asylum seekers and refugee participants; the project started after returning to Iran to make a Channel Four commissioned documentary, Mother/Country, where she revisited her mother's house after 23 years. In 2005, she established a separate media charity, Bridge + Tunnel Voices, to undertake the charitable and educational work she initiated, mainly working with refugees and asylum seekers; stepping down as the lead creative director in 2015. This led to the development of the feature film, I Am Nasrine, which received a BAFTA nomination in 2013. In 2014, she co-established Bridge + Tunnel France in Paris with James Richard Baillie to specialize in European co-productions. In 2019, she set up Which Witch, a new banner to undertake long-form TV drama, launching their first production, Refurinn, aka The Fox, set in the UK and Iceland.

Selected filmography