Sepand Mashiahof

Sepand (Sepi) Mashiahof is a trans-femme Iranian-American filmmaker, writer, and musician. Across all mediums, her work explores the unrelenting feelings of monstrosity that she’s internalized about her queerness. The horror genre is a powerful space for her to engage with her vulnerabilities and she’s committed her life to contributing her stories, ideas, and politics to its canon. Within her worlds, we find fairies causing queer bodies to actualize by rotting like fruit, aloof trans girls force-feminizing bigoted men, and solidarity found on the cross-generational trauma spectrum of queer history.

After a dissociative adolescence growing up in Los Angeles, she truly came of age in the underground arts and music community in Oakland, CA, where she co-founded the Scream Queens Radio program, a punk collective with a weekly show highlighting obscure gems of obscure genres. The show fostered lots of on-air discussions where the personal became political and the political became intoxicated radio karaoke that went on way too long. The show produced various interview zines, a music festival, and a magazine, before coming to close in 2018. Within the community she found through Scream Queens, many of Sepi’s philosophies of self-understanding came to be, including “body nihilism,” “trans girl ether,” and “trans girl urgency.”

As a musician, she crafted the darkwave video performance art project Placentaur (2009-2013), was a member of SBSM, a queer no wave industrial trio best described as “sentimental destruction” music (2013-2018), and most recently she failed at being a pop star as Moths Protect Me (2018-maybe it’ll happen again?). Her current musical focus is collaborating with her sister, The Bedroom Witch, on soundtracking her own films.

As a director, Sepi has collaborated with various artists on music video projects, including The Bedroom Witch, Divide and Dissolve, Lizard Bitch, Joyride!, and Beast Nest. Most notably, she made her short film debut with LOVE YOU FOREVER (2021), a seaside psychological horror about “two sisters trapped in a time-warped house, trying to survive the immensity of each other’s love.” Her second short SMOOTH will make its debut at film festivals this summer. A body horror film about body hair, SMOOTH chronicles a fugue night of dread as a fictional version of Sepi tries to transcend the arbitrary prescriptions of gender imposed on her body. The film is dedicated to all the hairy Persian trans girls who struggle in their refusal of western expectations of femininity.

Sepand Mashiahof is a second generation Iranian-American immigrant and trans-femme writer, activist, and musician. She holds a BA degree in Literature from the University of California, Santa Cruz, where she wrote her senior thesis on Horror Film, using a feminist lens to explore the signifiers of queerness within the anatomy of monsters throughout canonized film history.

She primarily writes queer/trans-led horror screenplays that lean into arthouse, psychological territories. Her first screenplay, Umbra, was one of the winners of screenplay 2019 contest, and was also shortlisted in Barnstorm's 2020 contest. Her debut short "Love You Forever" premiered at San Francisco Transgender Festival in November 2020, and will making more festival appearances throughout 2021. As an advocate for trans visibility, she hopes that her screenwriting/filmmaking efforts allow trans voices to emerge in positive and nuanced ways within the horror genre. After years of alienation, she burns with the hope that our time has come to be seen.

Sepand is also a musican and curator, having co-founded Scream Queens Radio/Magazine, a pirate radio broadcast and literary production that highlights women’s contributions to punk, post-punk, industrial, no wave, and noise genres from the past 60 years. This project has produced over 300 radio broadcasts, five magazine releases, and has become an international cult sensation among obscure music-lovers. She has played in various bands since 2007, most notably as a member of the queer industrial punk trio, S.B.S.M. The group has released three albums, toured over 15 countries, had music featured at the SF MOMA, and also created a reputation for themselves as one of the most cutting-edge and unique acts of the modern era.