Draft:Mahyad Tousi

Mahyad Tousi (born 1973) is a multidisciplinary filmmaker, writer, media strategist and philanthropist.

Background

Born in 1973 in Portland, Oregon and raised in the Iranian capital of Tehran, Tousi spent his childhood amid revolution, war, and societal upheaval. He emigrated to the United States as a teenager in 1986 and started working at age 14. He now lives in Los Angeles and Brooklyn.

Career

Originally a conflict zone videographer and documentarian, Tousi has written, directed, and produced narratives across film, TV, VR, video art, and emerging media, and works as a media strategist and industry advisor. In 2020, he stepped into philanthropy when he founded Starfish Accelerator, a creative IP accelerator designed to scale big pop culture narratives that take on major civic issues of the day through the lens of mid-career storytellers of color.

Advocacy

During the Iranian Green Movement starting in 2009, Tousi became a nexus of news coming from journalists he knew who were working in war zones. He provided news from the front to major US news organizations and began taking action to organize global networks of people to share information about the happenings in Iran.

Business ventures

Tousi is the co-founder, along with author Reza Aslan, of BoomGen Studios, an independent incubator and cross-platform development studio. It was founded in 2006 to develop, launch and consult on entertainment media about the peoples, myths, and cultures of the Greater Middle East.

BoomGen Studios has consulted on films including Prince of Persia: The Sands of Time; Body of Lies; The Promise; Rendition; Aladdin; Aladdin: The Broadway Musical; Portals; ZIKR: A Sufi Revival; A Hologram for the King; Rock the Kasbah; Rosewater; Miral; The Square; Amreeka; The Trials of Spring; and several TV series.

Philanthropy

In 2019, in pursuit of increasing visibility and opportunity for underrepresented voices in art and entertainment, Tousi founded Starfish, a creative accelerator investing in artist-entrepreneurs of color in the entertainment industry. Starfish’s philanthropic partners – Pop Culture Collaborative, The Doris Duke Foundation, and Pillars Fund – established four core principles for Starfish: “radical ownership, authenticity, transparency, and community.”  Tousi has stated that the goal with Starfish is "to better invest in diverse creators;" specifically, "in artists owning their own intellectual property (IP)."

In addition to Tousi, Starfish’s founding team includes Reza Aslan, former Sundance program officers Alesia Weston and Nina Spensley, and tech entrepreneur Sian Morson. Starfish’s accelerator program provides participants with a $50,000 stipend and support from three to four mentors who include content experts, topic experts and a fandom representative. The first cohort of participants launched in March 2020 and included: the Black genre writer Vanessa Benton, Vietnamese American playwright and filmmaker Derek Nguyen, Palestinian American television writer, producer and director Cherien Dabis, and Def Poetry Jam artist Amir Sulaiman. 

Film and television credits

Tousi co-produced the 2006 film Marvelous, starring Amy Ryan, Michael Shannon, Martha Plimpton, and Ewen Bremner. He produced Ben Gazzara’s last film, Looking For Palladin, in 2008, and was a consulting producer on the 2009 TV series "We Are New York."

He executive produced the ABC TV series "Of Kings and Prophets" in 2016.

In 2021-2022, Tousi was an executive producer on two seasons of the CBS primetime comedy “United States of Al,” honored by the MPAC Media Awards for “reaffirm[ing] the importance of on-screen representation and narrative building.” The show was known for including both Afghan writers and military veterans in its writers room, which wrote their family members’ real life-and-death efforts to flee Afghanistan into the plot of season two of the CBS comed (for which Tousi has story credit). 

In 2022, Tousi wrote and co-created with video artist Mika Rottenberg the feature film REMOTE, a “solarpunk fantasy” in which a woman discovers an anomaly in the virtual world that sends her on a quest toward a more genuine form of connection. REMOTE was commissioned by Artangel in the UK, Denmark’s Louisiana Museum of Modern Art, and Moderna Museet in Stockholm, Sweden, in association with Hauser & Wirth. The film was completed with support from MOCA's Environmental Council, Los Angeles; Musée d’art contemporain de Montréal; X Museum, Beijing; the Busan Biennale in South Korea; and San Francisco’s Contemporary Jewish Museum. REMOTE is in the permanent collections of the Louisiana Museum of Modern Art and Moderna Museet. REMOTE was screened at the 2022 New York Film Festival, at MOCA in Los Angeles, at the Tate, at SF MOMA, at MAC Montreal, at M+ in Hong Kong, at the Busan Biennale, at Berlin’s Julia Stoschek Foundation, and at the Moderna Museet.

Tousi is listed as a writer-creator on an upcoming “One Thousand and One Nights” adaptation for film, TV and gaming content.

Tousi is currently writing and producing a television adaptation of Ted Chiang’s novelette “The Merchant and the Alchemist’s Gate.” 

Virtual Reality

Tousi sits on the advisory board of MIT’s Center for Advanced Virtuality and speaks on the “critical impact of popular culture” in shaping our shared future.

In 2018, he executive produced the virtual-reality documentary ZIKR: A Sufi Revival.

Writing

In 2019 Tousi reported that he was finishing a novella and writing his first novel.

Awards

• 2022 MPAC Media Award for "United States of Al" (2021-22)

External links

• STARFISH website
• BoomGen on IMDB