Michael Aloyan

Michael Aloyan was born and raised in Los Angeles, CA. The son of Armenian immigrants, his father was an ambulance driver (an artist back in the home country) and his mother was a social worker (an aspiring concert pianist back home). Enthralled with films from a very young age, and supported by his parents, he started making stop-motion animated films with his dad's Hi-8 camera at the age of eight. With his father serving as character artist and Aloyan writing the scripts, the two built the clay puppets and miniature sets together.

Over the years Aloyan shifted towards live-action filmmaking. His mother bought him his own camera for his thirteenth birthday and that summer, he gathered his friends and made a 45-minute film. Aloyan rented out a local theater and charged $5 for admission, screening to a sold-out audience. He took the profits and invested them into making another film over the following school year. His younger brother, Arman Aloyan, began composing the score to all of his films. In his sophomore year of college, Aloyan penned "String", an original TV pilot that he sold to 20th Century Fox Television before his 20th birthday.

As an MFA Directing student at UCLA, he wrote a letter to actor Karren Karagulian (Anora, Tangerine) asking him to star in a short film called "This Land" (2019), in which he wrote the lead role for Karren. Admiring the young filmmaker's tenacity and persistence, Karagulian said yes. The two made another film together called "Carnivore" (2023), Aloyan's most personal film to date, that premiered in competition at the Golden Apricot International Film Festival.

Aloyan has been a finalist for the Sundance Screenwriters Lab, Academy Nicholl Fellowship, Warner Bros. Television Writers Workshop, Disney/ABC Writing Program, ATX Television Festival, and his recent work "The Dive" was a featured script on The Black List. He is currently working on his feature film debut.