Mania Akbari (Persian: مانيا اکبری, born 1974) is an Iranian filmmaker, artist, writer, and curator whose works explore women's rights, marriage, sexual identity, disease and body image.

[1] Her style, in contrast to the long tradition of melodrama in Iranian cinema, is rooted in the visual arts and autobiography.

[12] In 2007, Akbari was diagnosed with an aggressive form of breast cancer and the film she made that year, 10+4, explores the sensation of living "with both life and death.

[18][19] In 2019, Akbari released a second epistolary essay film, A Moon for My Father, co-directed with the sculptor Douglas White, which one critic praised as "a form of digressive-poetic cinema, connecting images and ideas in a dream-associative logic".

[20] Akbari directed Dear Elnaz (2020), a documentary about a person who was killed as a passenger on Ukraine International Airlines Flight 752.

[21] Akbari made the film How Dare You Have Such a Rubbish Wish, released in 2022, with clips of women in Iranian popular cinema from before the revolution.

[23][24] Akbari's filmmaking style consists of long takes, hand-held camera and almost painterly control of colour which is called "a cross between fiction and documentary.

"[9] The Guardian has noted that her feature films are "rivetingly human: pitiless, potent studies of domestic strife, and of the fight for happiness – and domination – in sexual relationships.