Pirooz Kalayeh is an Iranian-American filmmaker, author, and multimedia artist working across narrative and non-fiction storytelling. His hybrid cinema interrogates displacement, institutional power, and the boundaries of contemporary media, often blending live performance, text, and archival footage to shift audience perspectives.

My Room in Tehran Was Called America marks his eighth feature film release. His broader feature catalog includes the award-winning documentary Sometimes I Dream in Farsi, the narrative feature The Human War, and the hybrid film Shoplifting from American Apparel. He has also created dozens of narrative shorts and web series, including the upcoming narrative short Race to the Tree, the recently premiered performance film Edward Said Talks about the Need to Make Things Real—which debuted at the Gaza Biennial last year—and the ongoing web series Stories Between Iran & America. His work streams widely on platforms like Amazon Prime and Tubi, and has been featured in The Village Voice, Indiewire, and L.A. Weekly.

He holds a PhD from The European Graduate School, where his research focused on contemporary Iranian cinema under the supervision of Mike Figgis, Terrence Malick, and Wim Wenders. He also holds an MFA from the Jack Kerouac School of Disembodied Poetics