Antonio Aiello — Writer, Editor, Ghostwriter, Sundance Fellow
Sundance Institute Fellow in Episodic TV. Writer, editor, and ghostwriter of literary memoir and narrative nonfiction. Don't Forget Us Here and Letters from Guantánamo with Mansoor Adayfi.
Writer, editor, ghostwriter, and screenwriter. Sundance Fellow in Episodic TV: Pilot to Series.
Recent Projects
Letters from Guantánamo, An Audible Original
At Guantánamo, Mansoor Adayfi wrote letters he knew would never be delivered. With a nubby pen and government-issued paper, he addressed them to Pope John Paul II, space aliens, the Defense Technology Corporation, President Obama, Men's Health Journal, the Founding Fathers, Martin Luther King Jr., and Donald Trump — knowing every word would be read by interrogators, camp officials, and CIA analysts before it went anywhere. Most of the letters disappeared. Mansoor never saw them again.
Letters from Guantánamo, an Audible Original named one of Audible's Best Nonfiction titles of 2024, uses those letters as a framework to tell stories from inside Guantánamo that have never been told before.
"In this landmark work, Mansoor Adayfi gives us a guided tour through the nightmarish landscape of Guantánamo…Let us hope that Don't Forget Us Here will spark a long overdue reckoning with the horrors of Guantánamo and its many victims."
—Ron Chernow, bestselling author of Grant and Hamilton
“An incredible story! I am grateful to this joyously heartbreaking book for reminding me of what it means to be not just human, but humane.”
—Azar Nafisi, bestselling author of Reading Lolita in Tehran
"Don't Forget Us Here is a profoundly moving and immensely important tribute to the intelligence, resilience and humanity with which its author, Mansoor Adayfi, survived fourteen years as a detainee in the notorious Guantánamo prison camp."
—Francine Prose, New York Times bestselling author of Lovers at the Chameleon Club, Paris 1932
“A riveting, illuminating account of Guantánamo from a Muslim perspective.”
—Jonathan Hansen, author of Guantánamo: An American History
PEN America at 100
A sucker for history and archives, I wrote and directed this short film reflecting on and celebrating PEN America’s evolution over the past 100 into one of the world’s foremost literary and human rights organizations. Produced in collaboration with Hiker Creative Agency.
From Guantánamo, with Love
Shrouded in secrecy, Guantánamo occupies a mythic place in our collective psyche, a physical manifestation of America’s struggle to reconcile being both victim and perpetrator of gross atrocities. From Guantánamo, With Love is an hour-long historical drama based on true stories. The show lets us experience the stories of men who battled the world’s most powerful country to end torture, while struggling to claw back their humanity, and win their freedom. In a world peddling lies as truth, the show asks: What really defines our villains and heroes, and are our heroes the ones who betrayed us the most? Huge thanks to the Episodic TV team at Sundance for believing in us and this project.
GUANTÁNAMO VOICES AND THE NIB
Graphic narratives are a great way to tell important stories that often can’t be told with words alone. Mansoor Adayfi’s stories from Guantánamo are so full of humanity and life they were ripe for medium. Sarah Mirk, Matt Bors, Cora Currier, and illustrator Kane Lynch helped bring these stories to life for publication in The Nib and Guantánamo Voices.
BARD PRISON INITIATIVE Branding & Storytelling
Launched in May 2018, the Bard Prison Initiative website is a complete reimagining of how the organization communicates its mission. Using video, dynamic infographics, and narrative-rich text, we created a compelling story about innovating education on a broad scale, while introducing the inspiring stories of students redefining success.
PEN America Digital Archives
Launched in July 2017, the PEN America Digital Archive captures more than 50 years of cultural programming at the intersection of literature and freedom of expression advocacy. Developed in collaboration with Princeton University with generous support from the National Endowment for the Humanities and the Andrew W. Mellon Foundation, the digital archive makes available long-inaccessible but valuable public and private programming featuring the world’s foremost writers, intellectuals, and artists in candid and often heated discourse about the most relevant cultural and political issues of our times.
Glossolalia Issue 3: We agree
on Nothing
Issue 3 landed in bookstores across the country in May. More than two years in the making, "We Agree on Nothing" was edited by Canaan Morse and Eleanor Goodman and features gorgeous narrative center fold maps (also cover art) and new translations of fantasy, science fiction, poetry, and micro nonfiction from mainland China with translations by Jeremy Tiang, Andrea Lingenfelter, Jennifer Feeley, Jeremy Tiang, and Ken Liu. You can purchase copies here.
Soon after the November elections, I emailed the editors of the Illustrated PEN (Rob Kirby, MariNaomi, and Meg Lemke) to ask if we could commission a series of graphic narratives to amplify the voices and stories of communities whose concerns and lives may be most at risk under the new administration. The answer was a resounding, "Hell Yeah!" Our hope is that the stories created for this series will help empower and inspire people to stand up and speak out and to begin to repair what’s been so thoroughly broken.
Leonard Cohen's "Democracy"
Every now and then I need to stop and take in the work I'm a part of at the intersection of art and free expression. Most recently, Neil Gaiman and Amanda Palmer recorded a new arrangement of Leonard Cohen's "Democracy." I asked David Mack to create illustrations for the song and Olga Nunes to bring it all together in an animated video. The final piece is at once heartbreaking and hopeful (knowing we have a fight ahead), an accurate reflection of where we are today. We used the video at PEN America for our most successful end-of-year giving campaign that helped break fundraising records and broaden PEN America's audience.