Roxanne Varzi is an Associate Professor of Anthropology and Film and Media Studies at the University of California, Irvine. She is a core faculty member of the Culture and Theory PHD program, and the Working Group in African and Middle Eastern Studies. She is an affiliated faculty member of the
Dr. Samuel M. Jordan Center for Persian Studies and Culture, Religious Studies, and the Center for Global Peace and Conflict Studies. She is also on the editorial board of The Journal of Media Sociology.

Born in Iran to an American mother and Iranian father she migrated with her family to the U.S shortly after the Iranian Revolution in 1979. Dr. Varzi first returned to Iran in 1991 while on a year abroad at the American University in Cairo. When she graduated from the American University in Washington D.C in 1993, she returned to Iran for a year to live with her uncle’s family in Tehran. When she returned to the states, she wrote a memoir called Majnun’s Mask, from which three chapters have been published as short stories.

In 1995 she began graduate school in Persian Literature before deciding to study Anthropology at Columbia University in New York City. In 2000 she was awarded the first Fulbright for research in Iran since the Iranian Revolution. She completed her PhD in 2002 and was awarded a two year Woodrow Wilson fellowship that gave her a post-doctoral teaching and research fellowship at New York University’s International Center for Advanced Studies.

In 2005 Dr Varzi was a senior Iranian visiting Fellow to St Antony’s College, Oxford University in the United Kingdom and was at the same time a member of the faculty of Anthropology at the School of Oriental and African studies, University of London. During the summer of 2007 she was a visiting Professor of the UC program at the University of Lund in Sweden and for the 2007-2008 academic year, she was a fellow of Berlin's Wissenschaftskolleg's "Near East in Europe" program.

Her current projects include a book about artistic production by Iranians inside and outside of Iran since the revolution, and a sound installation regarding the power of war images that will premiere in Long Beach, CA in October and travel to Berlin in December. She lives in Irvine with her husband.