Aggie Ebrahimi Bazaz

I am an award-winning, Iranian-American documentary filmmaker, writer, and educator and the director of "Como Vivimos," screening March 5 at SXSWEdu. The film shares a year with a close-knit community of Mexican-American farmworking families and their school-aged children who live in a Migrant Family Housing Center five miles south of Stockton. Every year, families' lives and their children's schooling are disrupted when they are required by state regulations to vacate their homes and move at least 50 miles away from their school district at the end of the growing season.

As a documentarian, I proceed from the conviction that documentary *methods* are as important as documentary products; that documentary methods should themselves model the values we wish advanced through documentary products. Toward this conviction, I seek documentary methods which are equitable and which challenge hierarchical and inveterate power dynamics. I express my ideas through documentary films; community collaborations; nonprofit consulting; public speaking; writing; and teaching.

My films have screened internationally and I've received support from various fellowships including the Wexner Center for the Arts, the BAVC National Mediamaker Fellowship, and the international Incubator for Media Education and Development. I earned her M.F.A. in film from Temple University in Philadelphia and earned a master’s degree in multicultural literature and women’s studies from the University of Georgia, where I was researcher for the Civil Rights Digital Library.