Greetings!
Welcome to my website.
I am an ethnomusicologist, musician, music educator, editor, and community arts organizer based in Edmonton, Alberta. My work brings together music, politics, economy, disability, cultural institutions, education, and intercultural artistic collaboration.
I completed my PhD in Ethnomusicology at the University of Alberta. My doctoral research examined rock music, cultural politics, and the political economy of music in post-Soviet Azerbaijan. Based on ethnographic fieldwork in Baku, the project explored how musicians navigate state cultural institutions, commercial pressures, changing labour conditions, limited cultural markets, and broader political constraints.
More broadly, my research examines how music is shaped by markets, money, labour, institutions, inequality, and political power. I am particularly interested in how musicians exercise agency, create meaning, and develop subtle forms of negotiation or dissent within restrictive cultural and economic conditions. My work is interdisciplinary and draws on ethnomusicology, anthropology, sociology, political economy, cultural studies, media studies, and political science.
My areas of expertise include West Asian music, particularly the maqam-based musical traditions of Iran and Kurdistan, as well as Azerbaijani and Turkish musics. My research interests also include the political economy of music, music and labour, music and money, musicians’ agency, cultural policy, popular music, censorship, quiet dissent, and the relationship between artistic production and broader social structures. I have published research in Ethnomusicology, Popular Music and Society, and the Journal of Folklore Research.
As a musician, I perform primarily on Iranian tar. I also play the Kurdish tanbur and daf, and Turkish bendir. My artistic practice is grounded in West Asian maqam traditions, with a focus on improvisation, collaborative composition, intercultural performance, and transcultural music-making.
I have collaborated with musicians from different cultural and musical backgrounds, working across distinct traditions, instruments, performance practices, and approaches to improvisation. These experiences have shaped my interest in forms of collaboration that do not simply place musical traditions beside one another, but allow musicians to listen, respond, negotiate, and create shared musical languages.
Music education and cultural entrepreneurship have also been important parts of my work. In 2009, I co-founded the Delshodegan Music School in Karaj, Iran with Hadi Sepehri. The school represents an early part of my experience in arts entrepreneurship, music education, program development, and the practical work of building and managing a cultural organization.
Disability and accessibility are central to my artistic and community work. As a visually impaired musician, I am interested in how rehearsal, performance, communication, and artistic collaboration can be organized without relying primarily on visual cues. My disability-related work explores accessible rehearsal practices, listening-based collaboration, improvisation, and the artistic knowledge produced by disabled musicians and performers.
I have developed projects involving blind and disabled musicians with support from the Edmonton Arts Council. These initiatives focus on bringing disabled musicians together to rehearse, improvise, develop original work, identify access needs, and explore more equitable approaches to musical collaboration and public performance. Rather than treating accessibility as an addition to an existing artistic process, I approach it as part of the creative structure of the work itself.
I also collaborate with CRIPSiE, an Edmonton-based disability-centred integrated dance and performance organization. My involvement contributes a musical dimension to collaborative work connecting disability, dance, sound, improvisation, movement, and accessible artistic practice.
Another important part of my work has been my involvement in Music Connects Us, a University of Alberta research project based in a long-term-care setting. As a project musician, I played tar for residents, improvised in response to their movement, percussion, and other forms of participation, and collaborated with five more musicians, care staff, and members of the research team.
My community-engaged practice also includes designing and facilitating participatory music programs. In Edmonton, I developed World Sounds, Community Voices: Listening, Playing, and Creating Together, a community program introducing participants to music from different cultural contexts through listening, short performances, discussion, and accessible group improvisation. The program welcomes people with or without previous musical experience and emphasizes curiosity, participation, intercultural learning, and collaborative creation.
I am a co-founder and co-chair of the Iranian Ethnomusicology Network, which I established with Armaghan Fakhraeirad. The network is an international platform supporting research, dialogue, mentorship, and collaboration related to music and sound in Iran and in broader regional and diasporic contexts. Through the network, I have helped organize academic presentations, workshops, roundtables, discussion sessions, and a mentorship program connecting emerging researchers with established scholars.
The Iranian Ethnomusicology Network reflects my commitment to creating independent spaces for scholarly exchange, particularly for researchers whose work crosses disciplinary, national, linguistic, and institutional boundaries. It also provides a platform for discussing emerging research, sharing professional knowledge, and strengthening connections among scholars, musicians, and students working on music related to Iran.
I also serve as Editor of the Society for Ethnomusicology Newsletter, where I coordinate and edit contributions from scholars, musicians, committees, interest groups, and organizations. In this role, I initiated the Global Resonance column as an accessible platform for writing about music scholarship, artistic work, and intellectual communities in different countries and regions, with the aim of making locally grounded research more visible to an international readership.
Across my research, performance, education, editorial work, and community organizing, I return to several related questions: Who is able to make and sustain artistic work, and under what material and institutional conditions? How do political and economic structures shape musical possibilities? How do musicians and disabled artists create agency within unequal systems? How can accessibility become a generative part of artistic practice rather than merely an institutional obligation? And how can research, performance, and community collaboration contribute to a more equitable and socially responsive cultural life?