Filmmaker – Qalambaaz – Pakistani Oscar Committee
Raised in Nigeria and Pakistan, Iram Parveen Bilal is a Physics Olympian turned filmmaker. She just directed her 6th film, Extinction, a dystopian near future where Donald Trump’s ban on Muslim immigration is a reality. Her 2nd feature film, The PhD Movie: Still in Grad School, was a feature adaptation of the 7 million+-followed PhD Comics. Her first feature, Josh, a 2012 Women In Film awardee, enjoyed theatrical and ancillary distribution success in multiple territories.
Her next feature project, Forbidden Steps, a film about Islamophobia and Dance, is a Film Independent writer/director lab project, scheduled for filming in Spring 2017 in Chicago. She is also developing her TV Series The Pioneers for World Productions, which showcases the mass migration from South Asia to the UK in the 1950s in response to Queen Elizabeth’s frantic call for labor from the commonwealth nations.
Iram is a core committee member for iWe, a coalition looking to change female representation in Hollywood and is a co-chair on the Asian American Writer’s Committee at the Writers Guild Of America.
She also sits on the board of the community service organization, the Caltech Y. Bilal is the initiator of the Pakistani Oscar committee and is the founder of Pakistan’s first professional screenwriting lab QALAMBAAZ, about to initiate its third round of selections.