Fereshta Kazemi

Fereshta Kazemi is an Afghan-American film Actress in the United States & Afghanistan. Born in Kabul, Afghanistan at the height of the country's Russian take over, Kazemi fled with her family on one of the last planes out of Kabul. They went to Bankok, Thailand for a few years, then to New York City where she was raised. The family migrated to the California Bay Area in her mid-teens. At eighteen, Kazemi won an acting and academic scholarship to Marymount Manhattan College in NYC, where she studied acting and writing, the first Afghan female to study acting in the United States. Kazemi also earned a degree in Philosophy & Cultural Anthropology from the University of California, Davis. She continued graduate acting and screenwriting studies at Academy of Art University and earned an MBA, emphasizing in Film Production from Chapman University. In 2009, Kazemi starred in Heal, a film about Afghanistan which has won twenty international and domestic film festival awards, including winner of the Best Science Fiction/Fantasy Category at Comic Con International Film Festival in 2011. In 2010, Kazemi starred in Targeting, a U.S. psychological thriller, playing a young Afghan immigrant wife in the U.S., which included a scene of one of the first on screen kisses in cinema for an Afghan Actress. Kazemi has categorically been profiled as an artist creating change in Afghan culture through cinema, with NBC News calling her a "trailblazer". The L.A. Times said Fereshta offers "no apology, no explanation...Raised in the U.S., she is back now for the first time [in Afghanistan], determined to radically alter the way Afghans view women - particularly women who act". In 2013, Fereshta played the leading role in The Icy Sun, one of the first films openly dealing with rape in Afghanistan. NBC News said her role "breaks new ground for Afghanistan, where victims of rape can be forced to marry their attackers to preserve their families' honor". Pulitzer Prize winning photographer, Carolyn Cole, snapped Kazemi in one of the first miniskirts to grace the streets of Kabul since the fall of the Taleban in 2001.