Ash Koosha

Ash Koosha (Ashkan Kooshanejad) is a British-Iranian musician, artist and technology entrepreneur, born in Tehran on 13 August 1985. He studied at the Tehran Conservatory of Music, starred in Bahman Ghobadi's No One Knows About Persian Cats, and the Guardian reports he spent two weeks in prison in Iran for organising a music festival. He left Iran in 2009 and has been based in London for nearly 20 years.

In London he released albums including GUUD (2015) and I AKA I (2016, Ninja Tune) and staged virtual-reality performances. In 2018 he introduced Yona, an AI singer whose songs featured on his album Return 0. With his brother Pooya he co-founded Auxuman, which built AI virtual musicians, and Claigrid, an AI start-up he runs as CEO; he also co-founded the metaverse cloud company Oorbit.

The brothers launched Fountain 0 in 2025 to make AI-generated films, with ex-NBC executive Tom Rogers as executive chairman and Ash as CEO. Its first feature, Dreams of Violets, a 75-minute drama about Iran's January 2026 crackdown on protesters, which he wrote and directed, premiered at Tribeca on 10 June 2026, billed as the first fully AI-generated feature in a major festival's official lineup. Images came from Google's Nano Banana and video from Kling; he voiced every role and altered the voices with AI, and wrote the score and edited without AI, for about $2,000, by his own account.

Odysseus: The Fall, a retelling of Homer's Odyssey as a drowning man's memories, followed on Fountain 0's site on 16 September 2026. Fountain 0 credits him as writer, director, producer and sole creator; the studio's engine ran on Kling, and Odysseus wears his likeness. Reported runtimes range from 135 to 150 minutes and the cost was put in the mid-five figures; Futurism dismissed it as AI slop.