ABout
Nessa is a Canadian-Iranian writer, director and producer based in the unceded Musqueam, Squamish and Tsleil-Waututh Nations, (Vancouver, Canada). She is a graduate of University of British Columbia with a major in Anthropology and a minor in Political Science. She grew up in a loud, multi-lingual family.
After showrunning two webseries, Nessa co-produced Freaks (2018) which premiered at TIFF and is now streaming on Netflix. She later directed and co-wrote The Mirror (2019) as part of Crazy8s 2019 festival. Her second short film Decomposing (2021) is currently touring the festival circuit. She has served as associate producer, writer and sometimes even director for the Al-Jazeera podcast series, Hindsight (2020 - 2021), narrated by Charles Dance.
In 2019 she was part of the Vancouver chapter of Break the Room, a writing program launched by Paul Feig's digital production company, Powderkeg, to empower writers of colour.
More recently, she has developed Story Therapy, a new one-on-one program at Dunya Media, that reimagines the script development process for BIPOC writers, taking a holistic approach to story and script editing that also takes development of the human writer into account, aiming to fix a lot of gaps in the professional development pipeline.
Nessa pitched and won the 2022 MPPIA Short Film Competition. Her short, My Roommate Ahriman, premiered at the 2023 Whistler Film Festival.
Her work focuses on identity, loneliness and found families. She is currently developing Bad Persians, a very personal comedy series about the Iranian diaspora, as well as adapting My Roommate Ahriman into a feature film. Her most recent feature project as a producer, With Love and a Major Organ, is coming to theatres in April 2024.
When she's not making movies or writing, Nessa is lying on the floor because she is generally pretty tired.
