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Andrew Rieger and Michael Aloyan in This Land (2019)

Michael Aloyan speaks at Austin Film Festival (2018)

Karren Karagulian, Alexander Kaminer, Andrew Rieger, and Michael Aloyan in This Land (2019)

T.V. Carpio, Michael Aloyan, and Shvan Aladdin in Noise (2018)

Director Michael Aloyan on set of The Girl & the Sea

On set of Dark Eyes(2010). From left to right: Fabien Soudiere, Dragos Berg and Michael Aloyan.

Aloyan directing two Nazi soldiers on set of UNTERMENSCH (2010), with DP Nate Tieman behind camera.

Director Michael Aloyan, on set for the WW2 period film UNTERMENSCH (2010).

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 art from a young age, Aloyan spent most of his youth immersed in painting and sculpting. He soon fell in love with filmmaking and started making stop-motion animated movies with his dad's Hi-8 camera at the age of eight. With Aloyan writing the scripts and serving as character artist, he and his father built the clay puppets and miniature sets together.

For his thirteenth birthday his mother bought him his own camera 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 would go on to make another film together called "Carnivore" (2023), Aloyan's most personal film to date, that premiered in competition at the Golden Apricot International Film Festival and screened in competition at the Oscar-qualifying LA Shorts.

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, after which it sold to AMC Studios. He is currently working on his feature film debut.

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Michael Aloyan

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