Ari Handel

Ari Handel is a Swiss-born American neuroscientist turned film producer and writer, best known for his long-running creative partnership with director Darren Aronofsky. Born in Zürich, Switzerland, Handel spent only his earliest childhood there before growing up in a Jewish family in Newton, Massachusetts.

Handel’s path to cinema began in science: he earned a PhD in neurobiology from New York University and worked to sharpen his communication skills, including an internship with NOVA at Boston PBS station WGBH. Weighing careers in science writing and education, he ultimately moved toward screen storytelling as a way to translate big, complex ideas for wider audiences.

He and Aronofsky—once suitemates at Harvard’s Dunster House—co-wrote The Fountain and later Noah, a project Handel began developing around 2003. As a producer, he has helped bring several of Aronofsky’s most talked-about films to the screen, including The Wrestler, Black Swan, mother!, and The Whale.

On-screen, Handel is also credited in Pi as a “Kaballah Scholar,” and he appears as himself in the featurette Inside The Fountain: Death and Rebirth.