Cyrus Nowrasteh (Persian: سیروس/کوروش نورسته; /nəˈrɑːstə/; born September 19, 1956) is an American filmmaker. He has worked on numerous television series and made-for-TV movies including The Day Reagan Was Shot, Falcon Crest, Into the West, and the controversial docudrama The Path to 9/11. He has also directed the theatrical features The Stoning of Soraya M. (2009), The Young Messiah (2016), and Infidel (2020).

Nowrasteh was born on 19 September 1956 to an Iranian family in Boulder, Colorado, and grew up in Madison, Wisconsin. He graduated from Madison West High School in 1974 and was a city boys high school tennis champion. Nowrasteh attended New Mexico State University on an athletic scholarship and later transferred to the University of Southern California to attend the School of Cinematic Arts, graduating in 1977.

In 1986, Nowrasteh began his career by writing for the CBS television series The Equalizer. He went on to work on Falcon Crest as a producer and story editor and wrote the pilot for the USA Network show La Femme Nikita (1996). He made his directorial debut with Veiled Threat, a 1989 independent film based on the real-life murder of an Iranian journalist living in Orange County. The film was pulled from the AFI Film Festival after organizers received bomb threats, allegedly due to the film's criticism of Khomeini. Nowrasteh subsequently accused the AFI of buckling to "censorship" and claimed their pulling the film "killed" its chances at distribution.

He also worked on independent films such as the American/Brazilian production The Interview (1995), which played at Sundance and on the Showtime network; and Norma Jean, Jack and Me (1998).

In 2001, Nowrasteh wrote and directed the highly rated, award-winning Showtime presentation The Day Reagan Was Shot, which starred Richard Dreyfuss as Alexander Haig and was executive-produced by Oliver Stone. The following year he wrote 10,000 Black Men Named George, the story of the Pullman strike of the 1930s, for Showtime.

Nowrasteh wrote the "Manifest Destiny" episode of the highly regarded (16 Emmy nominations) Steven Spielberg and TNT miniseries presentation Into the West.

The 2006 ABC miniseries The Path to 9/11 aired under much controversy. Critics said it fictionalized the lead-up to the 11 September 2001 attacks in order to direct blame to the Clinton administration. Although Nowrasteh's screenplay for The Path to 9/11 was billed by the ABC network as having been "based on the 9/11 Commission Report", there were accusations that the screenplay evidenced political bias because of its allegedly contrafactual portrayal of events.

Nowrasteh admitted dramatic license in the movie. However, he maintained that a certain amount of dramatic license must be allotted in the process of writing a dramatic script with a historical underpinning (see docudrama and biopic). Although the precise conversations depicted in the script may never have taken place, he alleged that the general tone and content of events depicted in The Path to 9/11 were true. When asked if he thought of the script as a "historical document," Nowrasteh has responded: