Rola Nashef is a Lebanese-American writer, director, producer, and professor whose work has helped redefine how Arab-American life is portrayed in American cinema. Born in Lebanon and raised in Michigan, she creates films rooted in the people and places she knows best—stories that blend humor, intimacy, and emotional honesty while exploring identity, family, immigration, sisterhood, and belonging.
Her filmmaking career began with the award-winning short film Detroit Unleaded (2007), a 16mm portrait of a young Lebanese-American man working the night shift at his family's Detroit gas station. The film won multiple festival awards, including Best Short, and became the foundation for what would eventually grow into her debut feature.
That feature, Detroit Unleaded (2012), made American film history as the first Arab-American romantic comedy. Developed through the Sundance Institute Screenwriters Lab, IFP New York, Lincoln Center's Emerging Visions, and the A2E Distribution Lab, the film premiered at the Toronto International Film Festival, where Nashef received the inaugural Grolsch Film Works Discovery Award. Praised for its authenticity, warmth, and humor, the film continues to screen internationally and is widely taught in university classrooms as a landmark of independent and Arab-American cinema.
Following the success of Detroit Unleaded, Nashef turned inward, developing a more personal body of work inspired by her own coming of age. Her sophomore feature screenplay, Nadia's House, received the Adrienne Shelly Director's Award and follows four Lebanese-American young women navigating friendship, love, family expectations, and Detroit's 1995 underground techno scene. The screenplay expands the cinematic world first introduced in Detroit Unleaded, centering Arab-American women in a coming-of-age story rarely seen on screen and continuing Nashef's commitment to building an authentic American narrative from within her own community.
Named one of Filmmaker Magazine's "25 New Faces of Independent Film," Nashef has also received a Kresge Arts in Detroit Fellowship, a Knight Arts Challenge Award, and numerous honors recognizing both her filmmaking and contributions to Detroit's cultural landscape.
Alongside her creative practice, Nashef serves as a Professor of Practice at Michigan State University, where she teaches filmmaking, screenwriting, and producing while mentoring the next generation of storytellers. Her writing and commentary have appeared on NPR, MSU Today, Detroit Metro Times, and Arab American News, and she frequently consults with organizations on storytelling, commercial writing, and culturally informed marketing strategies.
Today, Nashef is developing three major projects that continue to expand the landscape of Arab-American storytelling: Nadia's House; The Deirmimas Archive Project, an ambitious effort to preserve and digitize more than 1,800 reels documenting seventy-five years of Lebanese immigration; and Shakespeare Is Lebanese, a feature documentary inspired by that archive that uncovers the hidden showbiz DNA of the Lebanese diaspora and reclaims a century of overlooked contributions to popular culture.
