Shortly after the Iranian Revolution, Khadivi emigrated to the United States with her family, settling in the San Francisco Bay Area.She graduated from Reed College and from Mills College with an MFA.In 2002 she began to research the Kurds, particularly their fate in the southwestern region of Iran under the first Shah.

She has worked extensively as a documentary filmmaker.She taught at Emory University as the 2007-2009 Fiction Fellow. She currently resides in California. She will teach a class at Santa Clara University this fall 2010.

• "Air and Water", Virginia Quarterly Review, Winter 2009

• The Walking
• A map to the dead, Mills College, 2006

Films

• 900 Women (2001)