Roxanne Varzi is a writer, artist, filmmaker, playwright, dyslexia ally and Full professor of Anthropology and Film and Media Studies at the University of California Irvine. She has a PhD in Social Cultural Anthropology from Columbia University, held the first Fulbright Fellowship to Iran since the Revolution, and was the youngest Distinguished Senior Iranian Visiting Fellow at St. Antony’s College, Oxford University and A Woodrow Wilson Scholar at NYU.

She is published in The London Review of books, Le Monde Diplomatique, The Annals of Political and Social Science, Feminist Review, Public Culture, American Anthropologist and authored two books,  Warring Souls: Media, Martyrdom and Youth in post-Revolution Iran, Duke University Press, 2006 and 2016 Gold Medal Award-winning Novel Last Scene Underground: An Ethnographic novel of Iran Stanford University Press. Her short stories have appeared in the New York Press and Anthropology and Humanism for which she won a first place short fiction award and in three anthologies of Iranian-American writing. She is the author of Death in a Nutshell: An anthropology Whodunnit in her Armchair Anthropology Whodunnit cozy murder mystery series that advocates for neurodivergent thinkers while teaching anthropology to everyone from High school to Grad school.

Her first film, Plastic Flowers Never Die, 2009 is distributed by Documentary Educational Resources and has been shown in Festivals all over the world.

Her multi-media sound and video projects, Whole World Blind, No Wings to Fly to God and Salton Sublime address war and climate change and have been shown in Los Angeles and in Berlin Germany. Her first play Splinters of a Careless Alphabet about French philosopher Henry Corbin and the Iranian Revolution is being developed as a graphic novel and her second play, Yalda: an Iranian Twelfth Night was directed by Eli Simon in a reading at the New Swan Shakespeare Center at UCI.

She is known for her work as a multi-modal anthropologist and has given workshops and spoke all over the world on her own work as well as on research design. 

She is currently at work on a graphic novel based on her play about the French philosopher Henry Corbin and the Iranian Revolution and on the second book in the Armchair anthropology Murder Mystery Series.

She is also a dyslexia advocate.