Date of Birth: 22 November 1969 - Rasht, Iran

theOscarSite Bio: Satrapi grew up in Tehran, Iran, in a progressive family. She attended the Lycée Français there and witnessed, as a child, the growing oppression of civil liberties and the everyday-life consequences of Iranian politics, including the fall of the Shah, the early regime of Ayatollah Khomeini and the first years of the Iran-Iraq war.

Satrapi's mother is a great-granddaughter of Nasser-al-Din Shah, Shah of Persia from 1848 until 1896. However, Satrapi points out that "the kings of the Qajar dynasty...had hundreds of wives. They made thousands of kids. If you multiply these kids by generation you have, I don't know, ten to fifteen thousand princes and princesses. There's nothing extremely special about that."

In 1983, at the age of 14, Satrapi was sent to Vienna, Austria, by her parents in order to flee the Iranian regime. She lived there during her high school years, returning to Iran for college. At college, she met a man named Reza, married then divorced him. She then studied Visual Communication, eventually obtaining a Master's Degree in Visual Communication from the School of Fine Arts in Tehran Azad University. Satrapi then moved to Strasbourg, France. She currently lives with her Swedish husband Mattias Ripa in Paris, where she works as an illustrator and an author of children's books.

Satrapi's career began in earnest when she met David B., a French comics artist. She adopted a style similar to his, especially in her earliest works. Satrapi became famous worldwide because of her critically acclaimed autobiographical graphic novels Persepolis and Persepolis 2, which describe her childhood in Iran and her adolescence in Europe in an intelligent and engaging portrait of everyday life. Persepolis won the Angoulême Coup de Cœur Award at the Angoulême International Comics Festival. Her later publication, Broderies (Embroideries) was also nominated for the Angoulême Album of the Year award in 2003, an award which was won by her most recent novel, Poulet aux prunes (Chicken with Prunes). She has also contributed to the Op-Ed section of The New York Times.

Persepolis was adapted into an animated film of the same name, co-written and co-directed by Satrapi and Vincent Paronnaud, which debuted at the Cannes Film Festival in May 2007 and shared a Special Jury Prize with STILL LIGHT by Carlos Reygados.

· Best Animated Feature Film 2007: PERSEPOLIS (w. Vincent Paronnaud)