FILMMAKER • SOCIOLOGIST • PHOTOGRAPHER
ABOUT
See my photographic portfolio here:
https://noaharjomand.myportfolio.com/
I am currently a chancellor's postdoctoral fellow in Media & Cultural Studies at the University of California's Riverside campus and co-director of the department's media lab.
I co-directed and co-produced the feature-length documentary Eat Your Catfish about my mother's life with ALS, winner of the 2024 Emmy Award for Outstanding Social Issue Documentary. The film premiered at the International Documentary Filmfestival Amsterdam in November 2021 and has since screened at major festivals including Sheffield Docfest, Full Frame, DocPoint Helsinki, Santa Barbara International Film Festival, and Taiwan International Documentary Festival. It won Best National Documentary at Istanbul Film Festival and Best Feature Documentary at Antenna International Documentary Festival. Eat Your Catfish received support from Catapult Film Fund, Field of Vision, Cinereach, Sheffield DocFest MeetMarket, and Meetings on the Bridge.
Parallel to my film work, I write about culture, media, and politics in the Turkish-, Persian-, and Kurdish-speaking world. Cambridge University Press published my first book, Fixing Stories: Local Newsmaking and International Media in Turkey and Syria, in 2022. Fixing Stories is an ethnography of the roles and strategies of “fixers” who broker communication between foreign journalists and sources. I show how fixers shape the news and manage their powerful but precarious position between cultural and political worlds. I am now producing a documentary feature film about fixers directed by Ora DeKornfeld.
I earned an MFA in Creative Writing & Writing for the Performing Arts from UCR in 2025, a PhD in sociology at Columbia University in 2018, and a bachelor's degree in public and international affairs at Princeton University in 2010. From 2018-2022, I was a postdoctoral fellow at Indiana University. The National Science Foundation, Institute for Turkish Studies, Indiana University Arts & Humanities Council, and UCR Health Humanities and Disability Justice Lab have supported my work.
Email: narjo001@ucr.edu
Instagram: @noahamirarjomand