Parham Donyai

Parham Donyai is an entrepreneur and artistic photographer born in Tehran, Iran, in 1971. His family moved to London in 1985 to escape the war with Iraq. He qualified in law in the early 1990s, practised briefly, then founded a sports nutrition company, which led him to photograph champion athletes and fitness models.

His site says he launched The Active Channel on Sky in 2009, which it calls Europe's number one health and fitness channel. In 2015 he opened a shop in Richmond, London, which he designed and which the site says was a runner-up for best design at the Retail Week Awards. He published the book Body Builder, a Photographic Perspective in 2005, and since 2023 has made digital art sold as limited-edition pieces. He says he divides his time between Gibraltar, London, Marbella, Lisbon, Miami and the Algarve.

Finding Alex (2026, P24 Pictures) is described on its site as the world's first full-length crime thriller made with AI, a British gangster film made for under 10,000 pounds. The site says a human wrote the screenplay, guided the direction and edited the film in Final Cut Pro, and credits Donyai with the screenplay and with the visual direction, scene selection, camera angles, pacing and storytelling decisions. It adds that his likeness was modelled and animated using AI.