List of Famous people born in Iran
Sam Dastyari
Sam Dastyari is a former Australian politician, who from 2013 to 2018 represented New South Wales in the Australian Senate as a member of the Australian Labor Party. Dastyari was previously General Secretary of the New South Wales branch of the Labor Party. He was the first person of Iranian origin to sit in the Australian Parliament. As a Senator, Dastyari was the subject of a Chinese-related donations scandal, which eventually led to his resignation from the Senate on 25 January 2018.
Shermine Shahrivar
Shermine Shahrivar is a German model and beauty pageant titleholder who won Miss Europe 2005.
Mohammad Mosaddegh
Mohammad Mosaddegh was an Iranian politician who served as the 35th Prime Minister of Iran, holding office from 1951 until 1953, when his government was overthrown in the 1953 Iranian coup d'état orchestrated by the United States' Central Intelligence Agency and the United Kingdom's MI6.
Colonel Pessian
Mohammad-Taqi Khan Pessian, more commonly known as Colonel Pessian, was an Iranian gendarme, fighter pilot and warlord who formed and led the short-lived Autonomous Government of Khorasan in 1921. He was killed in a battle with forces sent by Ahmad Qavam, the prime minister at the time.
Ruhollah Zam
Ruhollah Zam was an Iranian activist and journalist. He was best known for operating a Telegram channel named 'Amadnews', which he founded in 2015. Zam played a high-profile role in the 2017–2018 Iranian protests, to which he devoted special coverage at the time. In June 2020, an Iran court found him guilty of "corruption on earth" for running a popular anti-government forum, which officials said had incited the 2017–2018 Iranian protests. He was sentenced to death by an Iranian court and was executed on 12 December 2020.
Shahram Amiri
Shahram Amiri was an Iranian nuclear scientist who disappeared from Iran during 2009–2010 under disputed circumstances, and was executed by the Iranian government in August 2016.
Ustad Isa
Ustad Isa Shirazi was an architect of possible Persian paternal heritage whose ancestors settled in the Indian Subcontinent long ago, often described as the assistant architect of the Taj Mahal in Agra, India.
Al Sayed Musa al-Sadr
Musa al-Sadr was a Lebanese-Iranian philosopher and Shi'a religious leader from a long line of distinguished clerics tracing their ancestry back to Jabal Amel.
Nazanin Boniadi
Nazanin Boniadi is an English actress and human rights defender. Born in Iran and raised in London, she went to university in the United States, where she landed her first major acting role as Leyla Mir in the medical drama General Hospital (2007–2009) and its spin-off General Hospital: Night Shift (2007). Since then, she is best known for playing "Nora" in the hit TV series "How I Met Your Mother", Fara Sherazi in the Showtime spy thriller series Homeland (2013–2014), Esther in the historical drama film Ben-Hur (2016), Clare Quayle in the Starz sci-fi thriller series Counterpart (2017–2018), and Zahra Kashani in the action thriller film Hotel Mumbai (2018). Boniadi was an Amnesty International spokesperson from 2009 to 2015 and has been a board member of the Center for Human Rights in Iran since 2015.
Bahman Golbarnezhad
Bahman Golbarnezhad was an Iranian Paralympic racing cyclist competing in C4 classification events and an earlier powerlifter. During his powerlifting career, he won twelve gold medals and one silver medal in international competitions. Golbarnezhad had represented Iran in two Summer Paralympic Games, first in 2012 in London and later in 2016 in Rio de Janeiro. He was the only Iranian cyclist at the 2016 Paralympics. He was a veteran of the Iran–Iraq war.