Bita Shafipour is a multicultural, BAFTA-nominated writer, director and producer based in Los Angeles. She has a diverse portfolio of work in the film and art industries. Bita's first short THE COLOR OF FRIEND (2006) starring Homayoun Ershadi (The Kite Runner, Agora, A Taste of Cherry) was premiered at Miami Short Film Festival, where it was nominated for Best Foreign Language short, and is distributed by Zahra Pictures. She founded her own company, Socially Conscious Arts, in 2007 where, alongside her own filmmaking, she worked with a number of progressive artists in LA to produce socially relevant multimedia projects at venues such as LACMA, LA Opera, and Disney Hall. Her latest narrative short film LAST NIGHT IN EDINBURGH (2015), inspired by cases of forced child marriages in the UK, was premiered at BAFTA Scotland and at the Oscar qualifying film festival, Palm Springs ShortFest, in 2015. It was nominated for several awards and won the BAFTA New Talent Award for Best Actress (Hannah Ord), Best Director Award at Seattle Short Film Festival, Best Narrative Film Award at The Global Cinema Film Festival Boston, and The Vanya Exerjian: Empowering Women and Girls Award at the Socially Relevant Film Festival NY. This film was proudly part of The Body Female multimedia performance at LA Opera Connects in conjunction with the Eurydice Found Festival across Los Angeles in early 2020. Her art documentary LAYERS, a study of LA based veteran analog photographer Hadi Salehi, premiered at LACMA and won the Best Documentary Award at the Venice Fine Arts Film Festival in 2020; it is distributed by The Big Pieces. She has directed two feature length biographical documentaries about two influential Iranian-American women in Los Angeles.
Born and raised in Iran, Bita has lived in LA for over two decades and worked on three continents, always aspiring to tell the narratives of women and immigrants from a fresh perspective. She is an alumna of BAFTA, has taught Film Production at Edinburgh Napier University, UCLA Extension, and USC's School of Cinematic Arts, where she got her BA in Cinematic Arts in 2005. Her postgraduate degree in screenwriting is from UCLA. Bita frequently collaborates with BAFTA and Emmy Award winning writer and producer Chris Boyd. When she’s not making films and spending time with her family, she is curating films for local film festivals such as BAFTA Student Awards and DTLA Film Festival. She is proficient in Persian and English and speaks Spanish casually. She is inspired by her two children, nature, the formidable women in her family and the diversity of cultures around her.