Fereshta Kazemi is a remarkable Afghan-American film actress, whose life has been marked by remarkable resilience and determination. Born in Kabul, Afghanistan, during the tumultuous period of the Russian occupation, Kazemi's family fled the country on one of the last planes out of Kabul, eventually settling in Bangkok, Thailand, where they spent a few years before relocating to New York City, where she was raised.
As a teenager, Kazemi's family migrated to the California Bay Area, where she began to pursue her passion for acting and writing. Her academic achievements were impressive, as she won an acting and academic scholarship to Marymount Manhattan College in NYC, where she studied acting and writing, becoming the first Afghan female to study acting in the United States.
Kazemi's educational pursuits continued, as she earned a degree in Philosophy & Cultural Anthropology from the University of California, Davis. She also pursued graduate studies in acting and screenwriting at the Academy of Art University and earned an MBA, emphasizing in Film Production from Chapman University.
Kazemi's acting career has been marked by several notable roles, including her starring role in the film "Heal," a film about Afghanistan, which won twenty international and domestic film festival awards, including the Best Science Fiction/Fantasy Category at Comic Con International Film Festival in 2011. In 2010, she starred in the U.S. psychological thriller "Targeting," playing a young Afghan immigrant wife in the U.S., which featured one of the first on-screen kisses in cinema for an Afghan actress.
Kazemi has been recognized as a trailblazer in Afghan culture through cinema, with NBC News describing her as a "pioneer." The Los Angeles Times noted that Fereshta offers "no apology, no explanation... Raised in the U.S., she is back now for the first time in Afghanistan, determined to radically alter the way Afghans view women - particularly women who act."
In 2013, Kazemi played the leading role in "The Icy Sun," one of the first films to openly deal with the issue of rape in Afghanistan. NBC News described her role as "breaking new ground for Afghanistan, where victims of rape can be forced to marry their attackers to preserve their families' honor."
Kazemi's work has also been recognized by Pulitzer Prize-winning photographer Carolyn Cole, who snapped a photo of her wearing a miniskirt in one of the first such appearances in Kabul since the fall of the Taliban in 2001.
