Yalda Yazdani | Female Singers in Post-Revolutionary Iran

Im Rahmen von Houbara - Resonanzen Iran

After the 1979 revolution, the position of women in Iranian society changed drastically. According to the Islamic government, women are forbidden to sing as soloists in public spaces, and women's participation in music became more restricted. In her lecture, Yalda Yazdani, curator of the Female Voice of Iran project, provides a unique insight into the rich and active output of female singers in Iran today.

Yalda Yazdani is an ethnomusicologist and curator. She was born in Iran. She is currently working as a research fellow and completing her PhD studies at the University of Siegen in Germany. In 2020, she was selected for a full scholarship from the House of Young Talents Academy to work on her PhD project, which focuses on women's music in post-revolutionary Iran. In 2021, she was the winner of the DAAD (German Academic Exchange Service) Award, the world's largest funding organization for the international exchange of students and scholars. Since 2009, she has been conducting various field researches on women's singing and music in different regions of Iran. Since 2015, she has organized various intercultural projects, documentaries, music workshops and concerts in Iran and Europe with the aim of building bridges of cooperation between European and Middle Eastern musicians and artists. In 2017 and 2018, she founded and curated the festivals "Female Voice of Iran'' and in 2021, the festival "Female Voice of Afghanistan'' in collaboration with the Contemporary Opera Berlin. Currently, she is collaborating on several documentary film productions, primarily focusing on music and its potential to transcend cultural boundaries. Her primary goal is to find ways to improve the situation of female musicians from the Middle East, both in their home countries and internationally. Most recently, she has worked on the documentary projects "Saz, The Key of Trust" (Arte, 2018), "The Female Voice of Iran'', (Contemporary Opera Berlin, 2020) and "Female Voice of Afghanistan'', (Contemporary Opera Berlin, 2021).