Pro
Profile Complete
Pro
Profile Complete
Award-winning filmmaker and creative content producer with 10+ years of multi-genre experience.
Leila is commercially represented by Left Productions.
She is a member of Free The Work, Film Fatales, and Brown Girls Doc Mafia.
BIO
Leila is an award-winning director, editor, and visual artist. A process-based artist across various mediums, Leila’s approach is interdisciplinary, integrating unconventional visuals and narratives to subvert social and cultural binaries. Much of her work is informed by her multi-cultural upbringing and identity (Iranian-Brazilian-American).
Her work has been exhibited in film festivals, galleries, and museums worldwide, including the TATE Britain, LACMA, MOCA, and Ars Electronica. Her films have been in countless film festivals and premiered and been featured on outlets such as MUBI, Vice, The Creator’s Project, Paper Magazine, THUMP!, Afropunk, Paste Magazine, VH1, MTV, Autre Magazine, Hyperallergic, and The Guardian. Leila has been commissioned to work on projects for brands such as Nike, Converse, and Paradise, among others.
In 2015 she became the resident filmmaker and Creative Director of Women's Voices Now (WVN), a global non-profit advocating for women’s and girls’ rights through social impact film. During her time at WVN, she created, Girls’ Voices Now, a summer youth program that amplifies the voices of young women from underrepresented communities in Los Angeles by teaching them documentary filmmaking. In 2021, the films that were created during her time at WVN were awarded a Daytime Emmy for Children's Programming and Animation.
As a woman of color, a director, an editor, and an activist, my work focuses on exploring the boundaries of unconventional narrative and subverting aesthetic expectations in visual mediums. My practice as a filmmaker is rooted in the belief that visual media has the most potential to illuminate injustice, foster awareness and dialogue, create access, disrupt the status quo, and shed light on the problematic shadows that aim to divide us and divorce us from our humanity. I’m interested in the dualities and contradictions that exist specifically within the human existential experience, which has allowed my work to explore the spaces between subtlety and drama, fiction and nonfiction, the beautiful and the grotesque, masculinity and femininity, etc.