Name: Samina Saifee

Recipient Year: 2022

Sponsor: ISF Film Grant

Name of Film: Ayat

Description: Samina Saifee is an Indian-American Muslim writer/director based in Brooklyn, NY. She is a graduate of NYU’s Stern-Tisch BS/BFA dual degree program where she studied film and business, and her first short film, AMERIGIRL, is a recipient of the inaugural NYC Women Filmmakers (now PANO) grant. It has played at festivals across the country, including Brooklyn’s prestigious Nitehawk Shorts Festival, NewFilmmakers LA, Bentonville Film Festival, and the Academy-Award qualifying BronzeLens Film Festival. Her pilot script, HOW TO LOVE A WILD THING was selected for the 2022 Orchard Project Episodic Lab and she was a finalist for the 2022 Sundance x Adobe Ignite Fellowship. She has worked at Darren Aronofsky’s Protozoa Pictures and Lilly Singh’s Unicorn Island Productions, and she is a Warner Brothers Early Career Bootcamp Fellow. When she’s not creating, she can be found biking around Brooklyn, making chai, or reading in the park.

LinkedIn Profile: https://www.linkedin.com/in/samina-saifee-81a57b155