Parisa Zandbaf was born in a cinematic family. Graduated from the University of Tehran (acceptance rate: 10%), the Dutch-Iranian film director obtained her first MA from Spain and The Netherlands for which she was granted the prestigious Erasmus Mundus Joint Master scholarship (EMJM) (acceptance rate: 3%) funded by the European Commission. Alongside her studies, she has studied classical music and dance, performed in theater, and made fiction, experimental, and documentary short films. In 2021, she was selected as a jury member among a team of 7 artists at the Amsterdam Independent Film Festival; in 2022, a jury member among 13 other filmmakers, at the Changing Face International Film Festival (Sydney, Australia); and in 2023, she was a judge in the art history and theory panel among a group of 10 professional academics at the Global Undergraduate Awards (Junior Nobel Prize) in Dublin, Ireland. Currently, she is a Ph.D. candidate in film aesthetics at the University of Amsterdam. On a temporary leave, she is pursuing her second MA in filmmaking at the London Film Academy. She is one of the recipients of the prestigious Chevening Scholarship 2023-24 (acceptance rate: 1.9%) funded by the UK's government's Foreign, Commonwealth, and Development Office (FCDO), and partner organizations.