Samina Saifee is a filmmaker and writer based in Brooklyn and LA. She was born and raised in Michigan and moved to New York to study film at NYU’s Tisch School of the Arts.

She is a Sundance Building Bridges Fellow (2024), a Sundance Ignite Fellow (2024), and an Orchard Project Episodic Lab Fellow (2022). Her first short film, AMERIGIRL, is on NoBudge. Her second short, AYAT, starring Laith Nakli (Hulu’s RAMY, A24’s PROBLEMISTA), is currently in the festival circuit.

Her debut feature film, an expansion of her first short, has been selected for the Film Independent Producing Lab. Most recently, she assisted in the writers’ room for Riz Ahmed’s new Amazon Prime show.

As a fiction writer, she is working on her first novel as a Periplus Fellow under the mentorship of Zeyn Joukhadar.