BIOGRAPHY

Hisham is a Lebanese-American director, writer, and producer, born in Beirut, Lebanon. He studied filmmaking at Boston, Harvard, New York, and Illinois Universities and started working in pictures in the US and Hungary with directors Raoul Ruiz and Miklós Jancsó and producer James Schamus.

Hisham has made films in the US, Lebanon, Ireland, Korea, and France. His work has been shown in the Arab world and internationally, including the Doha Tribeca Film Festival, the Villa Medici (Rome), The American Academy in Rome, Beaux-Arts de Paris, Ayam Beirut Al Cinema'iya festival (Cinema Days of Beirut), Roma Contemporary Art Fair, Louvre Museum (Paris), Biennale Des Cinema Arabes (Paris), Milan Film Festival, Walker Art Center (Minneapolis), Institut du Monde Arabe (Paris), Harvard Film Archives (Cambridge), Reina Sofia (Madrid), Museum of Modern Art (New York), Cinémathèque Française (Paris), Centre Pompidou (Paris), Cairo Opera House, among others.

Hisham has served as a jury on a number of international film festivals including the Chicago International Film Festival. He has been instrumental in establishing filmmaking at the Lebanese American University (Lebanon, 1995), the Korean National University (Korea, 1999), and the Center for Advanced Visual Studies at MIT (2000-2003). He is also the co-founder of the Arab Institute of Film (AIF Amman, 2005).

Hisham is the recipient of grants from New York, Massachusetts, and San Francisco Arts Councils as well as the LEF, McKnight, Jerome, Rockefeller foundations, among others. He won the John Simon Guggenheim fellowship award in 2007, and in 2008 he won the McKnight Filmmaking Fellowship from the Independent Feature Project (IFP) as well as the American Academy Rome Prize and was named the John Armstrong Chaloner/Jacob H. Lazarus Metropolitan Museum of Art fellow by the Academy. He is currently an Associate Professor of film at the University of Minnesota.

SELECTED AWARDS