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Director + Producer

 

About

 

RAZAN GHALAYINI is a three time Emmy Award nominated writer, director, and producer. She is a Co-Executive Producer and Director at Full Frontal with Samantha Bee, where in addition to running the field department, she has written and directed over 70 field pieces across nine countries.In 2021, Film Independent invited Razan to develop her half-hour comedy, Known Associates, in the Film Independent Episodic Lab.

Razan created Full Frontal’s "This Is Not A Game:The Game" for the 2018 midterm elections. An appointment based trivia game, the app drove voter registration and turnout, reaching an unprecedented 250,000 users for vote.org in the months leading up to the election.

Razan has created short form content for the SundanceNow Doc Club, Bloomberg and The Intercept. Razan co-wrote The Intercept’s investigation into the Fort Dix Five and directed Entrapped, a short documentary about the case. Entrapped premiered at the 2016 Sundance Film Festival before playing at 15 festivals around the country.

Previously, Razan served as a supervising field producer for The Trials of Spring (PBS) and Homegrown (HBO). She co-produced and field directed We Are The Giant (Passion Pictures), about non-violent resistance in the 2011 revolutions in Syria, Bahrain, and Libya. She also served as associate producer on Koran By Heart (HBO).

She is represented by United Talent Agency and Odenkirk Provissiero Entertainment.

 

Work

Razan wrote, directed, and produced over sixty field pieces including segments in Moscow, Berlin, Jordan, Puerto Rico, Iraq, Djbouti, Hong Kong, and Rwanda for Samantha Bee. All of them were obviously VERY funny, but here are some favorites: My Errol Morris inspired ten minute feature documentary film on Reality Winner, Sam and Busy Phillips do a reproductive justice themed Escape Room (note: it is VERY hard to design an escape room?!) Full Frontal’s First Trump Positive Field Piece (in Iraq!), Gamify The Midterms Part 1 & Part 2, Deep Fakes, This American Trash, a piece about Voter Suppression starring Ashley Nicole Black and Stacey Abrams and with a Sarah Koenig cameo, and this scripted bit launching Full Frontal’s second game! Oh, and here are some pandemic field pieces I made featuring Kamala Harris, Elizabeth Warren and Ayanna Pressley. Or click the photo to see all of the pieces Razan has produced for the show.

Press

Elle wrote something nice about the women directors at Full Frontal. Here is a blog post I wrote for Film Independent about my time as an Episodic Fellow!  The Washington Post and The Hollywood Reporter wrote about the field piece I shot in Djibouti that resulted in reuniting American families stranded abroad. Rolling Stone wrote up a little something about the Elizabeth Warren interview I produced and directed for Full Frontal. The Hollywood Reporter covered an ATX panel I did about how TV is tackling voter suppression. I talked to Buzzfeed about what it’s like to make a late night show during a pandemic. ET talked with Sam and I about our time in Kurdistan. Variety wrote a nice article on the two pieces I directed in Iraq. Wired did a lovely job explaining This Is Not A Game: The Game, the midterm election game I spearheaded. Here is an interview I did with the New America Foundation about Entrapped, my film that premiered at Sundance. Vox featured LIMBO, my short for Sundance Now Doc Club on their site! The Hollywood Reporter talks about We Are The Giant, a movie I am very proud of.

Contact:

Managed by Tara Beppel at Odenkirk Provissiero Entertainment

Represented by Allyson Chung and Marissa Devins at UTA