Bahram Beyzaie

Bahram Beyzaie (1938-2025) was an award-winning Iranian filmmaker, theater director, playwright, educator, and scholar of the history of Iranian theater. Beyzaie was born in December 1938 in Tehran to a family of poets and literary scholars. He was first introduced to Western audiences in 1963 when his play was staged at the Festival du Théâtre des Nations in Paris. He was one of the leaders of the generation of filmmakers known as the Iranian New Wave, beginning in the late 1960s, and helped revitalize Iran's performing arts by incorporating Indo-Iranian mythology and Iranian conventional performing arts with modern theater and cinema. Beyzaie was the head of the Theater Arts Department at the University of Tehran for many years. 

Beyzaie directed ten feature films, including Downpour; The Ballad of Tara; Death of Yazdgerd; Bashu, The Little Stranger; and The Travelers, earning numerous national and international awards, most recently from the Venice Film Festival for Bashu. His scholarly contributions include major studies on Iranian, Japanese, and Chinese theater, research on One Thousand and One Nights, and a book on Alfred Hitchcock’s films. Beyzaie wrote numerous papers and published more than 70 books, monographs, plays, and screenplays. He directed 14 staged plays, ten feature films, and four short films. His comprehensive book Theatre in Iran (1965) is considered an authoritative account of Iranian theater history.

 Since Beyzaie's arrived at Stanford University in 2010 as the Bita Daryabari Lecturer of Persian Studies, he staged several plays and held workshops on Iranian mythology and cinema. From 2010 until his passing in 2025, he taught courses on Iranian theater and cinema at Stanford.