About the Author

Mahasti Afshar Ziai was born in Tehran. She studied Drama and Classical Music Production at the BBC/London and ORTF/Paris and served as technical director at the Shiraz Arts Festival before pursuing academic studies in the U.S. She earned a Ph.D. (1988) in Sanskrit and Indo-European Folklore and Mythology at Harvard; her dissertation was titled The Immortal Hound: Genesis and Transformation of a Symbol in Indo-Iranian Traditions. In 1989, she joined the Getty Conservation Institute in Los Angeles where she produced numerous documentaries and museum exhibitions around the world on humanity’s cultural heritage.  Her publications include Art and Eternity: Nefertari Wall Paintings; The Ecology of Conservation; Landmarks of a New Generation; Festival of Arts, Shiraz-Persepolis 1967-77; and translations of Shahrokh Mesbook’s Notes by a Traveler, Majid Lashkari’s The Theatre and Cinema of Arby Ovanessian, and an extensively revised version of Saeed Habashi’s Final Sequence about the father of Iranian cinema Esma‘il Kushan.