2022 Recipient of the prestigious Herb Alpert Award in the Arts for Film and Video, Bani Khoshnoudi is a filmmaker and visual artist born in Tehran, Iran and raised in the United States, in Texas. She studied architecture, photography and film at the University of Texas at Austin, and later continued her studies in the visual arts at the prestigious Whitney Museum of American Art Independent Study Program in New York City.

Her films and installations explore ideas of displacement, memory and invisibility. Her short film Transit (2004) won the Grand Jury Prize at Premiers Plans Angers and was nominated for the Jean Vigo Prize and the Prix Novaïs-Terxeira. Her first feature, Ziba (2012) was selected for the Cinéfondation Residency - Cannes Film Festival and premiered at the Rotterdam Film Festival. Her most well known documentary, The Silent Majority Speaks (2010-14), is part of the French film critic Nicole Brenez' list of top 10 essential films ever and is included in Georges Didi-Huberman's book "Uprisings". The film showed at the Institute for Contemporary Arts (London), ART OF THE REAL (Lincoln Center) in NY, and at the Centre Pompidou (Paris). In 2016, she was commissioned by the Centre Pompidou to make a film/performance entitled Transit(s): our traces, our ruins. Another film performance, 1968: A Blind Archive, was shown at the Fundação de Serralves in Porto and at Film Mutations, shown at the Contemporary Museum of Art in Zagreb and Rijeka in 2020. Fireflies (2018), her second feature fiction, premiered at Rotterdam and won the HBO Prize for best Ibero-American feature at the Miami IFF. Lead actress, Edwarda Gurrola won Best Actress at the Ariel Awards in Mexico for her role in the film.