Alex Fazeli - Portfolio

Biography

Alex Fazeli is an Iranian-born Canadian American writer, director, actor, and producer. He trained as an actor at the New Actors Workshop under the guidance of George Morrison, Paul Sills, and Mike Nichols before earning his BFA in live-action film directing from the California Institute of the Arts (CalArts).

After graduating, Alex served on the CalArts Alumni Board alongside notable alumni such as Dave Bossert, Don Cheadle, Michael Polish, and Paul Reubens. As chairman of the Ways and Means Committee, he designed and launched the Affinity Card, a mutually beneficial program that raised funds for the Alumni Association while providing students and alumni with software and service discounts. He was also selected to serve as director, cinematographer, and editor for the CalArts 30th Anniversary Legacy film, and later co-directed and produced the 35th Anniversary Edition, which featured Disney legends Roy Disney, Alice Davis, and Buzz Price.

He went on to earn his MFA from the prestigious Peter Stark Producing Program at USC's School of Cinematic Arts, where he produced, wrote, and directed a range of projects. He was awarded the coveted Peter Stark Special Project Award grant, which funded the production of In the Dark, a 35mm short about the CIA's role in extracting double agents from Tehran during the Iranian Revolution. In the Dark won Best Narrative Short at the Bermuda International Film Festival, qualifying it for consideration at the 82nd Academy Awards. The film was also nominated for Best Short Film at the BAFTA/LA Student Film Awards and has been screened at over 60 international film festivals, winning awards at 15 of them.

Alex's other works include Leaving, a feature-length screenplay set against the backdrop of the Iranian Revolution. The story follows Cameron, a young boy navigating the complexities of family loyalty, cultural identity, and political unrest while coming of age in revolutionary Iran. Leaving was a two-time Academy Awards Nicholl Fellowships quarterfinalist, a PAGE International Screenwriting Awards quarterfinalist, a semifinalist in both the Austin Film Festival and BlueCat Screenplay Competition (top 10%), and a Script Pipeline finalist. Additional projects include Hunger for Success, a 16mm film produced by Steven Gersh; War Radio, a film collage juxtaposing war and media; and The Depublican, a multimedia political satire experience.

In 2021, Alex was cast as Ed Doumani in Amazon Audible's scripted podcast Killing Hollywood: The Cotton Club Murder, alongside Christian Slater, Juliette Lewis, and Rainn Wilson.

His most recent project is The Good American, for which he wrote the story, co-wrote the screenplay, and is directing and producing through his production company Rebel Rouser Studios. The project was a 2025 quarterfinalist at the Austin Film Festival (AFF) and is currently in production with a planned release in fall of 2026.

He is the founder and CEO of Rebel Rouser Studios, Ltd., a film and television production company.

Writing

Screenwriting

For Alex, screenwriting is about putting voices on screen that too often get left out. The scripts explore themes of home, belonging, and identity, shaped by the immigrant experience and a life lived across cultures. At their heart, they wrestle with the choices we make, the consequences we live with, and the people who shape our worlds—family, strangers, communities. These are stories that entertain and engage, but also reflect on how we navigate the world we create together and what it means, in the end, to be human.

Lyrics & Poetry

The lyrics and poems echo the same themes found across Alex's work: memory, resilience, and the experience of being othered. They come from watching the world closely—how people treat one another, how we love, how we wound, and how we endure. Cinematic in scope yet intimate in detail, the writing transforms lived experience into rhythm and reflection, pieces that move you, make you think, and linger like scenes that stay in your mind long after they've ended.

Fiction

With a debut novel on the horizon, Alex is taking his storytelling into bold new territory. The book weaves together the themes that define his work—immigration, belonging, and the search for home—set against a backdrop where the boundaries of humanity and technology are tested. At its heart, it's a meditation on what it means to be human, and how we carry our need for connection and identity into new frontiers. Suspenseful, intimate, and thought-provoking, it's a story designed to move as much as it unsettles.

Blog

The blog is Alex's rawest outlet—part diary, part introspection, part workshop. It's where ideas form in real time, from notes on filmmaking and storytelling to reflections on memory, migration, and belonging. Like his photography, it circles the fleeting nature of experience: moments that fade, resurface, and reshape themselves in the act of remembering. It reads less like a polished essay and more like field notes from a life in motion—honest, restless, and always searching for what it means to be human.

Read Blog →

Directing

In the Dark

Watch Reel →

The Good American

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Producing

Rebel Rouser Studios

Visit Studio →

Music

Coming Soon

Photography

Alex is a published photographer whose work captures the tension between presence and memory. Commissioned to photograph Rupert Murdoch's Moraga vineyard in Bel Air and featured in The Guardian (UK) and Bloomberg Businessweek (US), his images are rooted in clarity yet carry the fleeting quality of a dream.

He is drawn to black and white photography for its intimacy and timelessness. Without the distraction of color, each frame feels direct and enduring, a moment suspended. But like memory itself, photographs are also fragile. Neuroscience shows that memory is not fixed, it is constantly reconstructed each time we recall it. In that way, a photograph is both permanent and ephemeral: a record that preserves what time erodes, and a reminder that no two recollections are ever the same.

The result is a body of work that feels both personal and universal, images that linger, fade, and resurface like dreams.

You can explore more of his photography on VSCO.