Arsalan Akhavan
After learning of his family’s unique connection to a masterpiece edition of the Shahnameh, Arsalan’s life changed forever. He traded sunny California for rainy Britain to launch Rug Entertainment, a multimedia company dedicated to making Persian stories both accessible and engaging for English-speaking audiences. Arsalan’s roots in entertainment trace back to the 1950s, when his grandfather, Mostafa Akhavan, founded Cinema Moulin Rouge, Iran’s first major film studio bridging Hollywood, Cannes, and Tehran. Arslan’s recent projects include Healing History, an immersive art history exhibition; The Good Iranian, a one-man show performed at the Edinburgh Festival Fringe (dir. Sepy Baghaei); Shahnameh Quest, a storytelling podcast; and Billion Dollar Masterpiece, a documentary short about the Shahnameh of Shah Tahmasb. He previously served as Director of Scripted TV Development at Lesli Linka Glatter’s Backyard Pictures with Universal Television and worked in the TV Packaging department at Creative Artists Agency (CAA). Arsalan has also spoken on the Shahnameh at Cambridge University and the House of Lords. He holds a BFA in Drama from NYU Tisch School of the Arts.
For more information about Arsalan, please visit the Rug Entertainment website.
Nazli Tabatabai-Khatambakhsh
Nazli Tabatabai-Khatambakhsh BSc. Hons, MLitt, MA, SFHEA is a multi-award-winning international leader and collaborator working across artistic disciplines and contexts in opera, theatre, dance, visual arts, film and performance poetry. Her credits include Royal Ballet and Opera, Welsh National Opera, Birmingham Opera, Britten Pears and Aldeburgh Festival, Oxford Song, Edinburgh Festival Fringe, Atmosphere Festival, Tete a Tete, National Theatre of Scotland, Traverse Theatre, Bush Theatre and City Theater Tehran. At the Guildhall School of Music & Drama, she is Professor of Dramatic Writing on the MA in Opera Making & Writing, and she is the inaugural practice-based Post Graduate Researcher in Libretto. She is the inaugural Associate Artist at the Oxford School of Drama and is an External Examiner for the Royal Central School of Speech and Drama. Her work as a coach, mentor and facilitator spans Clore Leadership, IETM and Edinburgh Performing Arts Development. For the International Society of Performing Arts (ISPA), based in New York, of which she is an Arts Council England Grad Fellow, she serves as a member of the Governance Committee. Her ever-evolving portfolio of new work and reinterpretations of existing work is infused by her country of birth, Iran, and is interwoven by the cultures she reconnects with locally across the UK and internationally across continents.
For more information about Nazli, you can check out her Instagram and Twitter profiles.
