Michael Aloyan

Michael Aloyan is an Armenian filmmaker who was raised in Los Angeles. Enthralled with films and storytelling from a very young age, and supported by his cinephile father, he started making stop-motion animated films with his dad's Hi-8 camera at the age of eight. With his dad serving as character artist and Aloyan writing the scripts, the two built the clay puppets and miniature sets together, after which they animated the characters frame-by-frame. Over the years Aloyan shifted towards live-action filmmaking and, at thirteen, he gathered his friends and made a feature film. He rented out a local theater and charged $5 for admission, screening to a sold-out audience. Aloyan took the profits he made from the premiere and invested them into making another feature over the following school year. He continued to shoot shorts while in high school, casting his younger brother and classmates in a variety of adventure films. In his senior year, he directed a short film called "Subhuman (Untermensch)", which screened in over a dozen film festivals, winning several international awards and acquiring distribution in over 40 countries across the world. 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. Hailing from UCLA's MFA Directing program, he has been a finalist for the Sundance Screenwriters Lab, Academy Nicholl Fellowship, Warner Bros. Television Writers Workshop, Disney/ABC Writing Program, and his most recent pilot, "The Dive," was one of the three highest rated scripts on The Black List (2020). He is currently prepping his period feature film "Hidden" set to shoot in England later this year.