Roya Rastegar, Ph.D., is a writer, scholar, filmmaker, and cultural strategist whose work examines visual culture and political power. She serves as Head of Narrative Research at Global Freedoms, a non-partisan 501(c)(3) organization that mobilizes culture to amplify freedom movements, scale human rights campaigns, and counter state-sanctioned extremism in Iran and worldwide.

Rastegar holds a B.A. in Economics, Mathematics and Studio Art from Wellesley College and an M.A. in Gender Studies and a Ph.D. in the History of Consciousness from the University of California, Santa Cruz, where she was advised by Angela Y. Davis. Her writing on culture, politics, and media has appeared in The Nation, Jadaliyya, and The Huffington Post, and her academic research has been published in peer-reviewed journals including American Quarterly, Screen, and Camera Obscura. She is currently completing a book manuscript, The Sundance Film Festival: Curating the Frontier of American Independent Film, the first critical history of Sundance and among the first comprehensive studies of American film festivals.

Rastegar's award-winning work as a filmmaker and producer spans documentary, hybrid cinema, fiction, and television, and reflects a sustained engagement with historical storytelling and cultural impact. Rastegar’s credits include Gaga: Five Foot Two (Netflix); Cypher (Tribeca Film Festival Grand Jury Prize); Venus as a Boy (Tribeca Audience Award); The Legacy of Black Wall Street; QueenMaker (Hulu). Rastegar’s writing debut in collaboration with Wu Tsang, Wildness (2013), premiered at the Museum of Modern Art’s Documentary Fortnight and screened internationally at major contemporary art institutions and biennials including Tate Modern, the Whitney Biennial, the New Museum, the Hammer Museum, the Berlin Biennale, the Gwangju Biennale, the Sharjah Biennial, and Performa 11. Winner of the Outfest Grand Jury Prize, the film has become a landmark work of queer-of-color cinema and performance-based documentary, and served as a key inspiration for José Esteban Muñoz’s final book, which engaged the project as a foundational exploration of queer worldmaking, nightlife, and collective cultural space. She is currently directing her feature debut, Exile of the Swans, a magical realist documentary portrait of six underground dancers in Iran. .

Rastegar is a Creative Capital Fellow in Emerging Fields and was a Helena Rubinstein Curatorial Fellow in the Whitney Museum of American Art’s Independent Study Program. She has programmed and curated for major cultural institutions and film festivals including Sundance, Tribeca, and the Los Angeles Film Festival, and has launched the film debuts of many of today’s most celebrated directors. She curated a year-long retrospective on 1990s Black New Realism at the American Cinematheque (2022–2023), as well as a film series on the Woman, Life, Freedom movement for UCLA’s Celebration of Iranian Cinema (2023). Rastegar has served on film festival juries and granting committees around the world, reflecting her longstanding leadership and international recognition across cinema, contemporary art, and cultural criticism.

Rastegar has designed and taught courses in film and media history, critical theory, ideology, political persuasion, and curatorial practice extensively in UCLA’s Department of Film, Television, and Digital Media and as Visiting Professor and Mellon Postdoctoral Fellow in the History of Art and English department at Bryn Mawr College.

She currently serves on the editorial board of SEEN: A Journal of Film & Visual Culture, published by BlackStar Projects. A first-generation Iranian American, Rastegar brings more than two decades of experience working across media, academia, and advocacy to advance cultural understanding and global freedom movements.