Roya Rastegar
Lecturer
Roya Rastegar, PhD is an acclaimed curator, filmmaker, and scholar with longstanding expertise in cultural impact and historical storytelling. Rastegar earned her Ph.D. from the History of Consciousness under the guidance of Angela Y. Davis.
Rastegar’s acclaimed producing credits include the Netflix documentary portrait of Lady Gaga, Gaga: Five Foot Two (2018); the Tribeca Film Festival Grand Jury Prize winning hybrid documentary/fiction, Cypher (2023), starring Grammy nominated rapper Tierra Whack; Tribeca Film Festival audience award-winner Venus as a Boy (2021); and the television docu-series The Legacy of Black Wall Street (2021). Rastegar is also the writer of the Hulu documentary QueenMaker (2023), and magical realist documentary Wildness (2012), in collaboration with MacArthur Genius fellow, director Wu Tsang.
Rastegar’s current book manuscript, The Sundance Film Festival: Curating the Frontier of American Independent Film, critically frames Sundance’s curatorial practices within the historical framework of American film festivals. This will be the first ever critical study of the landmark festival and the first history of American film festivals ever published. Her research on visual culture and history is widely published in peer-reviewed journals, including American Quarterly, Screen Journal, and Camera Obscura.
Rastegar was awarded a prestigious Creative Capital Foundation grant in Emerging Fields, and was previously a Curatorial Fellow at the Whitney Museum of American Art. With two decades of curatorial experience programming films for prestige American film festivals like Sundance and Tribeca, Rastegar has launched the film debuts of the most celebrated directors working today. Most recently, Rastegar curated a year-long retrospective film series on the “Black New Realism” wave in the 1990s, which was on view at the American Cinematheque from May 2022-2023; and a series of innovative short films around the Woman, Life, Freedom movement in Iran for UCLA’s Celebration of Iranian Cinema in May 2023.
She was previously a Visiting Professor and Postdoctoral Fellow at Bryn Mawr College, where she designed and taught courses in curatorial theory and practice. Rastegar serves on the editorial board of Black Star’s SEEN, a journal of film and visual culture focused on Black, Brown, and Indigenous communities globally. Rastegar is the Executive Director of Global Freedoms 501(c)(3), a non-partisan organization that mobilizes culture to amplify freedom movements, scale human rights campaigns, and raise awareness about state-sanctioned extremism globally. She is a first-generation Iranian-American, and a graduate of Wellesley College, where she received a BA in Economics and Studio Art.
