Iara Lee

Director & actor

Iara Lee is a Brazilian film director, producer and activist of Korean descent. From 1984 to 1989, she was the producer of the Sao Paulo International Film Festival in Brazil. From 1989 to 2003, she was based in New York City, where she ran the mixed-media company Caipirinha Productions. She is the founder of Cultures of Resistance Network, an organization that promotes global solidarity through creative resistance and nonviolent action, and the director of Cultures of Resistance Films. At the onset of the Iraq war in 2003, she decided to live in the MENA region in order to understand the conflict from that perspective. She spent extensive time in Syria, Yemen, Tunisia, Jordan, Lebanon, and Iran. In May 2010, she was a passenger on the MV Mavi Marmara, a vessel in the Gaza Freedom Flotilla that was attacked in international waters by the Israeli navy, leading to the murder of nine humanitarian aid workers.

Where to start: The Sami Song of Survival: Indigenous Activism on the Northern Frontier (2025).