Voices of Inspiration
A small ripple, given enough time and enough water, becomes a wave.
The biggest acts rarely start big. Someone teaches a language class. Someone records an interview nobody asked for. Someone stays late to make sure a story gets written down. Years later you look up and there's a whole community standing on work that started as one person deciding something mattered.
We wanted to know what those first ripples looked like — so we asked. Starting in October, every week we'll release a conversation with someone whose work has shaped Iranian life outside Iran. Not highlight reels. Real conversations about what they built, what it cost, and what they'd tell someone starting out with nothing but an idea and a stubborn streak.
Here are the first three faces.
She landed in Los Angeles in 1978 and spent the next five decades documenting a community as it invented itself. Six books, more than three thousand interviews, and the founding of the Center for Iranian Jewish Oral History — because she understood early that if nobody wrote it down, it would simply be gone.
A physicist by training, he spent seventeen years as Chief Scientist at the Radiation Safety Institute of Canada, then served as Ontario's Minister of Research, Innovation and Science. In 2018 Richmond Hill named a street Urmia Avenue, after the Iranian city where he was born — which is a quietly extraordinary sentence about what a life can do to a map.
He teaches Persian at UCLA, having spent eight years at Oxford before that. His research asks a question most classical scholarship skipped: what were the women actually doing in Ferdowsi, Gorgani and Nezami? He also translates Persian poetry into English, which is one way of describing the work of keeping a thousand-year-old conversation going.
Their conversations with Tirgan start in October.
One a week, released on our channels — and there are more faces to come.
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