Kamran Pasha

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Kamran Pasha is a Hollywood screenwriter and director. One of the first Muslims to establish himself in the entertainment industry, Kamran serves as a co-producer and writer for Sleeper Cell, Showtime Network's gritty terrorism drama. "Sleeper Cell" was nominated for the Golden Globe for Best Miniseries in 2005, and nominated for an Emmy for Best Miniseries in 2006.

[edit] Early career

Kamran was born in Karachi, Pakistan and immigrated to the United States at the age of three. He was raised in Brooklyn, New York, in the predominantly Hasidic Jewish neighborhood of Borough Park. His early experiences as a Muslim in a traditional Jewish environment generated a life-long fascination for religion and spirituality, and many of his scripts examine issues of faith.

Kamran attended Stuyvesant High School in New York, graduating in 1989. He went on to Dartmouth College, where he majored in religion and served as an editor of the college newspaper, The Dartmouth.

After graduating, Kamran worked as a journalist for the Wall Street publisher Institutional Investor and the Knight Ridder financial newsire. During his tenure as a reporter, Kamran interviewed international leaders such as Israeli Prime Minister Shimon Peres, Pakistani Prime Minister Benazir Bhutto, and Peruvian President Alberto Fujimori.

Kamran left the journalism world in 1996 and attended Cornell Law School. He subsequently enrolled in the MBA program at the Amos Tuck School of Business at Dartmouth, and graduated with a joint law/business degree in 2000.

[edit] Move into film industry

Kamran briefly worked as an attorney at the New York law firm of Paul Weiss Rifkind Wharton & Garrison before moving to Los Angeles to purse a career in filmmaking. He attended the MFA Producers Program at the UCLA School of Theater, Film and Television and graduated in 2003.

Kamran's first television writing job was as a staff writer on UPN's remake of the classic series The Twilight Zone.

In 2003, Kamran set up his first feature film project, an historical epic on the love story of the Taj Mahal, at Warner Brothers Pictures. He subsequently wrote a screen adaptation of the Japanese anime Kite in collaboration with Hollywood director Rob Cohen and producer Anant Singh. Kamran has also written screen adaptations of the Japanese horror film Ghost Actress by director Hideo Nakata, and adapted Deepak Chopra's novel Soulmate.