Who We Are

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Rozina Ali
Rozina is an editor at BGTV. She received her Masters in International Affairs from the School of International and Public Affairs at Columbia University, where she explored state building and political development in the Middle East and South Asia. As a journalist, she has written about diaspora communities in the U.S. and human rights, women’s rights and civil society in M.E. and S.A. Her interests include writing, photography, fiction, and any medium that engages civil society and leads to change.

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Reza Aslan
Reza Aslan is the Chief Creative Officer and cofounder of BoomGen Studios and Executive of BGTV. He is best known, as an internationally acclaimed writer and media commentator, and author of the New York Times bestselling No god but God and How to Win a Cosmic War. He teaches creative writing at the UC Riverside and blogs for the Daily Beast. The Huffington Post just named him one of twelve people on twitter “Who Rock Our World”. Why you ask? Cause of BoomGen silly! Check it out.

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Jessica Chermayeff
Jessica recently moved to Los Angeles to try something new. A native of the East Coast, Jessica studied Anthropology, Arabic and Film at Brown University in Rhode Island, where she was the Editor-in-Chief of Clerestory Magazine, Brown’s oldest fine arts publication and the personnel Manager of Brown’s Visual Arts Media Lab. She has worked in fine arts photography in New York, Chiapas Mexico, San Juan del Sur Nicaragua, and Tangier Morocco. She created two solo photography exhibitions in Providence and is working on two film shorts. In the heart of America’s glamorous film industry, she hopes to keep her new projects informed and humble.

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Kouross Esmaeli
BGTV producer and writer, Kouross is a documentary filmmaker and journalist living in New York. He is a member of the Big Noise Films collective with whom he covered topics as varied as Iran’s 2008 Parliamentary elections and New Orleans after hurricane Katrina. His work has appeared on MTV, Current TV, and Aljazeera English. His documentary for MTV on the lives of American soldiers and young Iraqis after the American invasion won the Edward Murrow Prize for best Television documentary in 2005. Kouross has covered Iran extensively both for Current TV and Aljazeera English. His short documentary for Current on the Basij is the only portrayal of the paramilitary group in the Western media, earning one of Current TV’s highest-viewed documentaries of 2007, and gaining even greater attention in the post-2009 election unrest.

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Harold Moss
Harold Moss is Executive Producer of BGTV and the co-founder of FlickerLab, a creative services company that has created thousands of hours of animated, live action, and multi-media content for film, broadcast and the web. FlickerLab is a triple bottom line company, focused on making socially and environmentally conscious media across all platforms and building sustainable media brands. Notably, Harold Moss created the three-minute cartoon, A Brief History of the USA, in Michael Moore’s Academy Award winning, Bowling for Columbine (2003) and was a producer of the 2008 Sundance Grand Jury Prize winning documentary, Trouble the Water. Moss is currently directing The Wild Life, an animated series teaching kids about climate change, which he also co-created.

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Nadia Sah
Nadia Saah is a partner and head of Development at BoomGen Studios and Executive at BGTV. She is a media executive at the intersection of entertainment and activism with 15 years of experience in business and content development, brand management and grassroots & philanthropic consulting. Spending nearly a decade at Discovery Communications leading international & new media business development and licensing, Nadia then launched Fair Play Media to root the Arab narrative in pop-culture consciousness through strategy consulting for non-profits and media companies including Healing the Divide, The Arab Fund for Arts and Culture, Warner Independent and Hammerstein Productions. As a BoomGen Partner, Nadia’s mission is to position high-quality, relevant Middle East entertainment content for success in global mainstream markets.

Mahyad
Mahyad Tousi
Mahyad is the CEO & cofounder of BoomGen Studios and Executive Director of BGTV. Mahyad is a chronic entrepreneur, creative nomad, and certified workaholic. He has worked in over 24 countries as a producer, director, and cinematographer, in both fiction and documentary; traditional narrative story telling, as well as for fine art projects. His handy work has won numerous awards and has been distributed theatrically, on television, as well as in museums Internationally. He eats and drinks media and social change, even during Ramadan.

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Yasmin Vossoughian
Yasmin is BGTV’s host and writer. As a foreign correspondent, Yasmin has reported from the Middle East, West Africa, East Asia, Europe and the US. After graduating Occidental College, Yasmin worked at E!: Entertainment Television. For DTV, she covered the 9/11 terrorist attacks, the New York City Mayoral Race as well as red carpet interviews with such celebrities as Salma Hayek and Tom Cruise. As a correspondent for Current TV, she traveled to Iran and produced a documentary on the underground youth culture and brought a story to life for millions of viewers who had never been exposed to this side of Iran. In 2006, she was awarded the CINE Golden Eagle Award for her work. She has anchored for Gallup Poll’s Chief World Poll Correspondent where she covered stories from around the globe, interviewing former Secretary of State Madeleine Albright, former House Speaker Newt Gingrich, Ambassadors, world leaders and a a number of young creative.