Beyzai started writing plays in 1962. His first play was “Dolls.” A year later, in the summer of 1963, he wrote one of his most famous plays, “So Dies Hero Akbar.” In 1968 he became one of the founders of the Iranian Writers' Association.

In 1973, he became a full-time assistant professor of drama at the College of Fine Arts, University of Tehran, and director of performing arts. Cinema celebrities such as Ezatollah Entezami, Susan Taslimi, Parviz Pourhosseini, Amin Tarakh, Asghar Hemmat, Reza Kianian, Behrouz Gharibpour and others were all students of Bahram Beyzai.

The censorship policies of the Islamic Republic overshadowed Beyzai's works.

The film “Ballad of Tara,” which was made by Beyzai in 1979, was not screened in Iran; Beyzai screened it at the 1980 Cannes Film Festival. In 1979, Beyzai staged the play “Death of Yazdgerd” in Tehran, but when he made a movie from the play in 1981, it was prevented from being shown. And eventually, in 1981, Beyzai was expelled from the University of Tehran after 20 years of teaching.

“Bahram Beyzai was fired two months before retiring,” said Hamid Samandarian, a well-known Iranian theater director.

Beyzai has said that in the years after the 1983 Cultural Revolution, which saw the "Islamization" of Iranian universities, he was no longer allowed to teach at university. In 1986, he made the film “Bashu, The Little Stranger,” but his film was banned until 1989. Beyzai sent the film to the French Film and Art Festival at which it won first prize.

In 1987, he made “Maybe Some Other Time.” Beyzai stated in an interview that the purpose of making this film was to “reduce pressure.” After a short stay in Sweden, he returned to Iran and was able to screen the film “Travelers” in 1992 and gain some hope of being able to work in the country again.

The election of the reformist Mohammad Khatami as the President in 1997, and the relative freedom in the cultural space in the country, made Beyzai more hopeful for the future. After 18 years of being away from the stage, he simultaneously staged “The Lady Aoi” and “The Deeds of Bondar the Counselor” productions at the Chaharsoo and Qashqaei halls of Tehran’s City Theater. But the relative freedom did not last long. One year later, in 1998, he wrote the play “Ceremony of Sacrificing Sennemar,” which was banned from being staged. The story was repeated again in 2000, when he wrote “Majlis-e Zarbat Zadan,” a play referring to the first Shia Imam. The play did not pass censorship and was banned from being staged.

Summoning and interrogating him in the basement of a police station in the 1990s, as well as forced meetings with Saeed Emami, the then Deputy Minister of Intelligence in Mohammad Khatami's government, were a cornerstone of the Iranian regime's security crackdown on Beyzai.

On February 19, 2002, Beyzai said that he had been interrogated for many years in Iran about his past, future and beliefs, and that the treatment was ongoing.

In a sarcastic quote, Beyzai has said: “Every time I wanted to make a film or stage one of my writings, I received threatening anonymous letters from political groups who considered my existence a threat to their religious rituals and wanted me to stop working. It is a blessing that in this country, all the political groups agree on shutting down the cultural work despite their competition with each other. The far left, and the far right, and the lefitst posing as the right or the right groups posing as the left; there is no difference between them.”

After the Chain Murders in Iran (a series of assassinations in the 1990s of dissidents and intellectuals, orchestrated by the Ministry of Intelligence) were revealed, Beyzai started the production of “Killing Mad Dogs” in 2001 after many meetings with officials of the Ministry of Culture and Islamic Guidance. The following year, the movie was screened at the 19th Fajr Film Festival and, in addition to being selected as the “Audience’s Choice for Best Film,” won other awards for screenwriting, acting, cinematography, and costume design. The film was also well-received at the box office and became one of the most commercially successful films in the history of Iranian cinema. 

In 2003, Beyzai published “Divan-e Namayesh,” a collection of his plays in two volumes. Then he staged “The Thousand-and-First Night” in Chaharsoo Hall that same year. In the summer of 2005, he took “The Passion of Master Navid Makan and His Wife Engineer Rokhshid Farzin” to the stage of Tehran’s City Theater, which referred to the Chain Murders. The play was banned for an unknown reason after 24 performances and despite the laudatory public reception.

Beyzai continued his efforts to workduring those years in Iran and to resist censorship. His next play, “Afra or the Day Passes,” was staged in the winter of 2007 in Tehran's Vahdat Hall and was met with unparalleled success and critical acclaim. Then, a year later, he made the film “When We Are All Asleep,” which was released in 2008.

After making this film, Beyzai tried to stage two productions, “Tarajnameh” and “Sohrabokshi” [Kkilling Sohrab], but he was blocked again and none of the plays received permission to be staged. After this unsuccessful attempt to stage his work, Beyzai decided to emigrate. In 2010, at the invitation of Stanford University, he went to the United States together with his wife, Mojdeh Shamsai. He has been teaching and conducting research at Stanford University since that time.

Many of Bahram Beyzai's works have been translated into various languages, including English, Arabic, French, Spanish, German and Turkish, and a number of his plays have been published and staged in various countries around the world. The artistic career of Bahram Beyzai includes ten feature films, four short films and about 70 plays and books in Iran and abroad from 1962 until today.