Zaid Adham
- Director
- Producer
- Writer
Zaid Adham is a Canadian writer, producer, and director with
international credits in both film and television.
Adham was born in Amman, Jordan in 1983 and raised for most of his life in Dubai. After graduating in 2006 with a dual BA in Visual Communication from the UK, Zaid went on to do an internship with CNN International, working with acclaimed journalist Christiane Amanpour as an assistant and translator during his tenure there. After moving back to Dubai, he began work in the advertising industry and subsequently moved back to television as a producer for the now-defunct Much Music Arabyeah channel. In 2007, he moved to Toronto, completing a diploma in Post Production and working with renowned media mogul Moses Znaimer's ZoomerMedia empire.
Zaid's first break into the film industry came with the acceptance of his film, Black Coffee, as a contender for the 2006 MINI Film Festival, a side project of the Dubai International Film Festival (DIFF). After a successful run in the independent film circuits in the UAE, his first Canadian production 'Minus 1' enjoyed equal success on the festival circuit, appearing first at the 2009 Buffalo Niagara Film Festival in Buffalo, NY.
In 2011, Zaid returned to Dubai to produce and host 'Treasure Hunters', a documentary adventure series pursuing the worldwide sport of geocaching. The pioneering program diverged from production norms in the Middle East and was the only program on satellite television to air in Arabic with English subtitles. Work on 'Treasure Hunters' was inspired by the travelogues of former Monty Python star and travel documentary host Michael Palin.
Primarily a director of psychological thrillers, Zaid's work in mixed media is an unorthodox blend of abstract surrealism and audiovisual symbiosis. On screen, his work has often been described as Lynchian in tone, in a sense that it often flows as a tonal poem rather than a proper narrative.
Generally, however, Zaid's work tends to reflect humanity's fragile state of being, with influences in storytelling and atmospherics by such genre-defining directors as Stanley Kubrick, David Lynch, Luc Besson, Terry Gilliam and Quentin Tarantino.
Adham was born in Amman, Jordan in 1983 and raised for most of his life in Dubai. After graduating in 2006 with a dual BA in Visual Communication from the UK, Zaid went on to do an internship with CNN International, working with acclaimed journalist Christiane Amanpour as an assistant and translator during his tenure there. After moving back to Dubai, he began work in the advertising industry and subsequently moved back to television as a producer for the now-defunct Much Music Arabyeah channel. In 2007, he moved to Toronto, completing a diploma in Post Production and working with renowned media mogul Moses Znaimer's ZoomerMedia empire.
Zaid's first break into the film industry came with the acceptance of his film, Black Coffee, as a contender for the 2006 MINI Film Festival, a side project of the Dubai International Film Festival (DIFF). After a successful run in the independent film circuits in the UAE, his first Canadian production 'Minus 1' enjoyed equal success on the festival circuit, appearing first at the 2009 Buffalo Niagara Film Festival in Buffalo, NY.
In 2011, Zaid returned to Dubai to produce and host 'Treasure Hunters', a documentary adventure series pursuing the worldwide sport of geocaching. The pioneering program diverged from production norms in the Middle East and was the only program on satellite television to air in Arabic with English subtitles. Work on 'Treasure Hunters' was inspired by the travelogues of former Monty Python star and travel documentary host Michael Palin.
Primarily a director of psychological thrillers, Zaid's work in mixed media is an unorthodox blend of abstract surrealism and audiovisual symbiosis. On screen, his work has often been described as Lynchian in tone, in a sense that it often flows as a tonal poem rather than a proper narrative.
Generally, however, Zaid's work tends to reflect humanity's fragile state of being, with influences in storytelling and atmospherics by such genre-defining directors as Stanley Kubrick, David Lynch, Luc Besson, Terry Gilliam and Quentin Tarantino.
