Maziar Bahari is an Iranian-Canadian journalist, filmmaker and human rights activist. He was a reporter at Newsweek from 1998 to 2011.
While covering the 2009 Iranian election protests, Bahari was incarcerated by the Iranian government for 118 days in one of the world’s most brutal and infamous prisons. On the basis of this experience Bahari wrote the bestseller Then They Came for Me, which was published in 2011 and informed Jon Stewart’s 2014 film Rosewater.
Bahari went on to found the citizen journalism site IranWire.com, the freedom of expression campaign Journalism Is Not a Crime and the street art and social justice project Paint the Change.
Bahari’s films include Paint! No Matter What (1999), Football, Iranian Style (2001), Along Came a Spider (2002), Mohammad and the Matchmaker (1994), Targets: Reporters in Iraq(2005), Greetings from Sadr City (2007), Online Ayatollah (2008), The Fall of a Shah (2009) and An Iranian Odyssey (2010).
