Ardalan, Davar 1964- (Iran Davar Ardalan)

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Ardalan, Davar 1964- (Iran Davar Ardalan)

PERSONAL:

Born 1964, in San Francisco, CA; daughter of Nader (an architect) and Mary (a writer and translator) Ardalan; children: Saied, Samira, Aman, Amir. Education: University of New Mexico, B.A.

ADDRESSES:

Home and office—Annapolis, MD. Office—National Public Radio, 635 Massachusetts Ave. N.W., Washington, DC 20001. E-mail—[email protected]; [email protected].

CAREER:

Worked as a model; news anchor in Tehran, Iran; KOAT-TV, Albuquerque, NM, staff member; KUNM-FM, Albuquerque, radio reporter; National Public Radio (NPR), Washington, DC, temporary production assistant, 1993-94, field producer for Weekend Sunday Edition, 1994-2005, producer of Morning Edition, 2005—.

AWARDS, HONORS:

Associated Press award for health and environmental reporting; Gracie Award (with Jackie Lyden), American Women in Radio and Television, 2002, for Loss and Its Aftermath (NPR documentary).

WRITINGS:

My Name Is Iran: A Memoir, Henry Holt (New York, NY), 2007.

SIDELIGHTS:

Davar Ardalan was born Iran Davar Ardalan in San Francisco, California, and has lived and worked in Iran and the United States. After twelve years with National Public Radio, she became producer of the long-running Morning Edition for which she has produced segments that featured a range of celebrities, from actor and philanthropist Paul Newman to chef Alton Brown. In 2002 she received a Gracie Award with Jackie Lyden for a series about Israeli and Palestinian parents who lost children during the Middle East conflict.

Ardalan was featured in a three-part radio documentary for the NPR American Radioworks series, which she produced with Rasool Nafisi. Her similarly titled My Name Is Iran: A Memoir documents her multilayered life and those of other generations of women in her family, both American and Iranian. Ardalan is the granddaughter of an Iranian doctor, Abol Ghassem, and Helen, a young American nurse. He learned English in an Iranian mission school at the age of forty alongside children, studied in the United States through a scholarship, worked in a carnival to pay for medical school, and graduated from the University of Syracuse while in his fifties. The couple moved to Iran, where they had seven children and lived in the private hospital they established.

Ardalan's mother and Harvard-educated father moved to Iran when she was an infant. She grew up in Tehran and returned to the United States after her parents' divorce, relocating to Brookline, Massachusetts, with her father. After the taking of hostages in 1979, which resulted in anti-Iranian sentiment in the United States, she dropped her first name. After finishing high school Ardalan returned to revolutionary Iran, donned the veil, and entered into an arranged marriage. She returned to the United States and was divorced, remarried, and again divorced.

A Publishers Weekly contributor wrote: "Ardalan's testimony to the feminist spirit of the pioneering women in her family … is a supreme achievement." "What keeps the reader reading My Name Is Iran, wrote Michiko Kakutani in the New York Times, "is the remarkable trajectory traced by members of three generations of Ms. Ardalan's family, as they moved back and forth between the East and West, Iran and America, trying to balance a personal equation of tradition and modernity, religious faith and individualistic freedom."

BIOGRAPHICAL AND CRITICAL SOURCES:

BOOKS

Ardalan, Davar, My Name Is Iran: A Memoir, Henry Holt (New York, NY), 2007.

PERIODICALS

Booklist, November 15, 2006, Deborah Donovan, review of My Name Is Iran, p. 18.

Kirkus Reviews, October 15, 2006, review of My Name Is Iran, p. 1051.

New York Times, January 5, 2007, Michiko Kakutani, review of My Name Is Iran, p. E43.

PR Newswire, January 31, 2007, "From Modeling in Suburban America to an Arranged Marriage in Iran: NPR Producer's Personal Journey between Iran and America."

Publishers Weekly, November 13, 2006, review of My Name Is Iran, p. 46.