Golnar Fakhrai is an Iranian-American filmmaker living in Southern California. As a child, she spent weekends watching films with her father, something that would plant the seed for her later desires to work behind the camera and make films of her own. What stimulates her creativity is how and in what ways the moving image can affect people. She believes cinematography enhances the story and affects how the audience perceives each character and scene, creating a world and mood to evoke our emotions and leave us lingering with memories long after the film has ended. Her goal is to further develop and employ these skills as a cinematographer so that she can inspire people to recognize and perhaps change the way they think and interact with one another. Fakhrai received an award from the American Society of Cinematographers for her work as the director of photography on the short film Half in her junior year of undergraduate study. She will begin her graduate studies as an AFI Cinematography Fellow in August 2010.