Emelie Mahdavian is an Emmy, Peabody, and Sundance Award-winning filmmaker whose films have screened at major venues including Telluride Film Festival, Sundance Film Festival, Centre Pompidou, Berlin Film Festival, and Dance on Camera at Lincoln Center, garnering awards recognition, international press, and receiving international theatrical distribution. Formerly a professional dancer and a professor of film who lived for several years in an off-grid mountain cabin, her films are often character-driven stories centering women, their embodied experience, and the environment. She is drawn towards ambitious, authentic, and immersive storytelling.

BITTERBRUSH is in release with Magnolia Pictures/Hulu. It was hailed as “sublime” by Indiewire, was selected as a New York Times Critics Pick, and Variety critic Tomris Laffly selected it as a “Top 10 film of 2022” alongside Tár and The Banshees of Inisherin.

She produced, wrote, and edited MIDNIGHT TRAVELER, which premiered at Sundance, won numerous international prizes, and was nominated for a Gotham Award for Best Documentary. She has also edited both fiction and documentary features that have screened at Toronto Film Festival, MoMA New Directors/New Voices, IDFA, Rotterdam, Busan, and more. She was editor and Co-Executive Producer on Abby Ellis' THE LAKE (Sundance 2026). Other editing credits include Sam Feder's HEIGHTENED SCRUTINY (Sundance 2025), Nan Chen's SINGING IN THE WILDERNESS (New Directors/New Voices, Rotterdam, Hot Docs 2021), and Amy Redford's ROOST (TIFF, IFC).

Emelie directed the fiction short THE FOLKESTONE LADIES' EROTIC FICTION CLUB, written and produced by Sharon Burrell. The film is a proof of concept for a TV series.

She is also working on a feature documentary, entitled PLANET A, about a women-led science team who are the last humans to set foot on the ice shelf of Thwaites Glacier in Antarctica. The film was the result of a solo-filming expedition, and has been supported by development funding from Sundance Sandbox Grant, Tangled Bank Studios, Catapult Film Fund, and NSF/BAS.

Her first fiction feature, THE PELICAN, co-written with Matt Canavan, is being supported by a Screen South development lab.