AhmadKiarostami

Ahmad Kiarostami is the president of the Kiarostami Foundation, a non-profit based in San Francisco, CA. Before the Kiarostami Foundation, he co-founded Koantum, a platform to teach science to elementary school students in the United States, and founded Fotomoto (acquired in 2012) where he holds several patents on distributed e-commerce. Before moving to the United States in 2001, he founded three tech companies in Iran.

Ahmad makes music videos and has produced 24 FRAMES, Abbas Kiarostami’s final film, co-produced COUP 53, a feature documentary on the story of the CIA/MI6’s coup in Iran that overthrew Prime Minister Mossadegh, and FEATHERS OF FIRE, a visually breathtaking cinematic shadow play by Hamid Rahmanian, inspired by the Persian epic Shahnameh (‘The Book of Kings’).

In 2014, Ahmad started Docunight, an initiative to show Iranian documentaries, with monthly screenings in 25 cities in North America, which is now a streaming service to make Iranian documentaries available everywhere in the world.

Ahmad has served on the boards of The Roxie (the oldest operational movie theatre in North America) and San Francisco Cinematheque.

Ahmad has studied Math and Computer Science at Sharif University. In 2007, Ahmad was chosen as a “young leader” at Asia Society’s “Asia 21’s Young Leaders” summit, and in 2016 became fellow at Aspen Institute, an international nonprofit think tank founded in 1950 and based in Washington, DC.