Cyrus Moussavi is an award winning Iranian-American filmmaker and music archivist. His work focuses on overlooked or underheard music, and the larger stories it tells.

His short films include I Snuck Off The Slave Ship, a science-fiction documentary directed in collaboration with the musician and artist Lonnie Holley, which screened at dozens of festivals and galleries including Sundance, BlackStar, and Blum & Poe in LA.

Cyrus is currently in production on his first feature film, Somebody’s Gone, a documentary about the great Georgia spiritual singer Brother Theotis Taylor, told through the vast video archive of his son (and co-director) Hubert Taylor. The film is supported by Creative Capital, Sundance Doc Fund, the NEA, Bay Area Video Access Coalition, Camden International Film Fest / Points North, and Kodak.

He is the founder of Raw Music International, a documentary collective creating films about underground music around the world. Their work, from Mongolia, Myanmar, Kenya, Iraq, and Ukraine, has featured at film festivals, screenings, and publications like Time, Wall Street Journal, and NBC News.

Since 2019, he has run Mississippi Records, an independent archival record label that has been releasing music by totally original (and as a result often overlooked) artists for nearly 20 years. He is dedicated to working directly with artists and their families, securing their legal rights and creating equitable documents of their work to share with the world. 

Cyrus grew up between Iowa and Iran. He studied economics and philosophy at Columbia, oral history and migration on a Fulbright grant in Amsterdam, and worked as a translator with migrants in Greece. He is based in New York.