Taktouka Band and Harmal Band
Double Bill and Festival Launch party
Live at Nublu
New York Arab Festival (NYAF) is thrilled to present for its opening this year, an evening dedicated to Arab music and contemporary composition, with two New York bands, Taktouka and Harmal. A double-bill featuring brilliant musicians whose work crosses cultures, sonic expectations and poetry.
Live at Nublu
April 1st at 7pm
151 Avenue C, NYC
Tickets here
Haza Souk
Eid Edition
Music, Market and Food
Continuing with our Eid Celebrations and the launch of NYAF’s edition for this year, come join New York’s iconic DJ-duo and party organizers, Haza on April 6th for their new souk! The Haza Souk promises a lineup of DJ sets, specially crafted drinks, NYAF goodies for sale at the NYAF info-point, and a Hummus Party by Abdalrahman among many others. Be sure to check out Angie Assal’s exquisite handmade jewelry, and learn about her upcoming dance performance at New York Arab Festival.
Cafe Erzulie- 894 Broadway, Brooklyn
April 6th, 2025
2pm- 6pm
WRONG WINDS
AHMAD ALMALLAH READING AND A TALK
WENDY’S SUBWAY
In partnership with Wendy's Subway, New York Arab Festival invites poet and writer Ahmad Almallah to present a reading from his latest poetry collection, Wrong Winds (Fonograf Editions, 2025), and discuss his reckoning with the English language, as a writer working and publishing in the diaspora, reflecting on his own verbal and cultural experience of existing between languages and societies.
Ahmad Almallah grew up in Palestine and currently lives in Philadelphia. His newest poetry collection, Wrong Winds, is out with Fonograf Editions (2025). His other collections include Border Wisdom (Winter Editions 2023) and Bitter English (Chicago 2019). He is currently artist in residence in English and Creative Writing at UPenn.
Wendy’s Subway- 379 Bushwick Avenue
Brooklyn, NY 11206
April 8th, 2025- 7pm
TICKETS
RASHA NAHAS
LIVE IN CONCERT
featuring Haza Party/DJ Carmen Sandiego
New York Arab Festival (NYAF) is excited to present an evening of live music dedicated to the power of iconic women in the Arabic music industry. Headlined by Palestinian rockstar Rasha Nahas and her band, and featuring the incredible Haza Party/ DJ Carmen Sandiego.
Live at Brooklyn Art Haus
April 13th, 2025
Doors open at 7:15pm
Shows start 7:30pm
Tickets
Samia Gamal Centennial Tribute
Angie Assal and Soumaya MaRose
Live at Jalopy Theatre
New York Arab Festival (NYAF) is honored to curate and present a Centennial Tribute to the history and memory of the iconic dancer, choreographer and actress Samia Gamal. Born in Egypt a century ago, Samia Gamail toured the world with her paradigm-changing dance techniques, and made New York one of her favorite hubs for her performances that took the city by storm decades ago. As a gesture of resisting the erasure of Arab art histories, and the history of dance, New York dancers and choreographers Angie Assal and Soumaya MaRose will feature in a double-bill celebrating the artistry of Samia Gamal’s iconic dances, in an evening of joy, grace and beauty dedicated to Baladi-dance, or what’s commonly known as Raqs Sharqi.
Live at Jalopy Theatre
April 16th, 2025
Doors open 7:30pm, Show starts 8pm
Tickets
New York Arab Shorts
At the Museum of Moving Image
New York Arab Festival Coming back for its yearly partnership with MoMI, this program of Arab short and experimental films is a partnership with the Museum of Moving Image and the New York Arab Festival. Featuring films that experiment with form, format and narrative, this year’s program looks at notions of illusion, myth, transformation and reckoning. Featuring filmmakers including Khaled Jarrar, Sarah Brahim, Alia Haju and others, and a lineup of paradigm changing young actors and filmmakers from across the Arab region who will speak at the panel after the screenings program.
April 27th at 12:15pm
Museum of Moving Image
Tickets here
RASEEF Forum
Conceived and curated by anthropologist and urbanist Adam Kucharski, Raseef (meaning sidewalk in Arabic) looks at the relation of art to infrastructure. Each edition gathers thinkers from the fields of art, urbanism, architecture, citymaking and policy, to think and develop frameworks of understanding how our cities operate, and how our ideas shape the world around us. This year, RASEEF thinks of the notions of congestion and smoothness.
Free Entry
April 28th 6pm- 8:30pm
April 29th 6pm- 8:30pm
Buro Happold: 100 Broadway, NY, NY
Free Entry. RSVP Link
Performing Histories
NYAF x La Mama Moves
Performance, performing arts, choreography, dance or theater seem like clear and distinct categories within a western canon mode of thinking of the phenomenon of performing. In the Arabic language however, the semantic fields that the word performance evoke are rich and confusing. A tapestry of odds and of alternative historical narratives, the way the canon (if we may describe it as one) of performance in the Arabic speaking region is. This performance series expands our understanding of contemporary Arab performance today by looking at radical and underground histories of choreography, poetry, writing, music and visual art from Joyce Mansour to Etel Adnan, through the music of Halim ElDabh, or contemporary experimentalists including choreographers Sarah Brahim and Nadia Khayrallah, and poet-performance artist Andrew Riad.
Curated by Adham Hafez, produced by ARC.HIVE, HaRaKa Platform, and powered by Wizara. The project is part of ‘Tawareekh: Contemporary Arab Art Histories’, an initiative documenting, surveying and disseminating contemporary Art history from the Arabic speaking region.
May 1, 2, 3 and 4th
at La Mama Community Art Space
Followed by panels with several guest speakers, and a keynote lecture by Khaled Jarrar.
Nadine El Roubi Experience
Live at LPR
Featuring Dania
Nadine El Roubi made her mark on the music scene in 2020 with her explosive freestyle “#FEMALE”, a bold and provocative statement that showcased her prowess as an MC. Though she had introduced herself with the introspective singer-songwriter anthem "Throne" two years earlier, #FEMALE cemented her ability to command attention with sharp lyricism and fearless storytelling.
Over the past four years, her steadily growing body of work has amassed millions of streams, drawing listeners into her unique blend of neo-soul and hip-hop. With co-signs from industry heavyweights like SZA, A Tribe Called Quest’s Jarobi White, and recognition from Rolling Stone, Nadine El Roubi is rapidly emerging as a breakthrough artist—one poised to leave a lasting impact on both the SWANA region and the global music scene.
Opening for Nadine is the incredible Croatian-Syrian-American singer and musician Dania, whose powerful voice bridges Arab and Western traditions. Influenced by everything from Fairouz's soaring melodies to art pop and jazz, her songs explore themes of homeland and love. Growing up with little Arab representation in American arts, Dania hopes to be the person she wished she had seen on stage when she was younger.
May 7th at 7pm
Le Poisson Rouge (LPR)
158 Bleecker Street, NY, NY
TICKETS
Poems of Consumption
H. Sinno at National Sawdust
Marking the first appearance of H.Sinno at New York Arab Festival, we are excited to present ‘Poems of Consumption’, live at National Sawdust.
Poems of Consumption turns Amazon customer reviews into “pop songs” written, composed, arranged, and produced by H.Sinno and their collaborators. The harsh electronica and lush string quartet are accompanied by video work by Sinno and Matteo Zamagni which further saturates the performance with a relentless barrage of phantasmagorical visuals.
LIVE AT NATIONAL SAWDUST, MAY 14
DOORS AT 6:30PM, SHOW AT 7:30PM
Tickets
Arabé
Amanda Ekery and Band
Album launch and live concert
Marking the album launch of Syrian-Mexican-American composer, and songwriter Amanda Ekery, New York Arab Festival is excited to present ‘Arabé’ live in concert at Nublu Classic.
Syrian-Mexican-American, multi-instrumentalist, vocalist, and composer Amanda Ekery creates music filled with imagery and strong narratives. Her work has been featured at the Portland Jazz Festival, Panama Jazz Festival, and The Kennedy Center, and spans Off-Broadway theater, film, and multiple studio recordings. Amanda has been awarded the Jerome Hill Artist Fellowship, the Jazz Journalist Association Jazz Hero Award, and the ASCAP Phoebe Jacobs Prize and Herb Alpert Young Jazz Composer’s Award. Learn more at aekerymusic.com
Presenting this fourth full-length release by vocalist, multi-instrumentalist, and composer Amanda Ekery, Árabe invites audiences to explore Syrian and Mexican shared history and culture on the El Paso border - the story of Ekery’s life, lineage and identity.
LIVE AT NUBLU CLASSIC
MAY 23rd, 2025 at 7PM
62 Loisaida Avenue, NY, NY
TICKETS
The Hollow Half
Sarah Aziza
Book Launch and Talks
Sarah Aziza in conversation with Andrew Riad
with poetry from
Lara Atallah & Chase Berggrun
A brush with death. An ancestral haunting. A century of family secrets. Sarah Aziza’s searing, genre-bending memoir traces three generations of diasporic Palestinians from Gaza to the Midwest to New York City—and back
“You were dead, Sarah, you were dead.” In October 2019, Sarah Aziza, daughter and granddaughter of Gazan refugees, is narrowly saved after being hospitalized for an eating disorder. The doctors revive her body, but it is no simple thing to return to the land of the living. Aziza’s crisis is a rupture that brings both her ancestral and personal past into vivid presence. The hauntings begin in the hospital cafeteria, when a mysterious incident summons the familiar voice of her deceased Palestinian grandmother.
In the months following, as she responds to a series of ghostly dreams, Aziza unearths family secrets that reveal the ways her own trauma and anorexia echo generations of violent Palestinian displacement and erasure—and how her fight to recover builds on a century of defiant survival and love. As she moves towards this legacy, Aziza learns to resist the forces of colonization, denial, and patriarchy both within and outside her.
Weaving timelines, languages, geographies, and genres, The Hollow Half probes the contradictions and contingencies that create “nation” and “history.” Blazing with honesty, urgency, and poetry, this stunning debut memoir is a fearless call to imagine both the self and the world anew.
The Word Is Change
368 Tompkins Ave, Brooklyn, NY 11216
MAY 27th, 2025 at 7PM
Free Entry
MORE INFO
The Alchemist’s Recipes
NYAF Art Marathon
Art, Design, Food at Atelier Jolie
New York Arab Festival
The Invisible Dog
Atelier Jolie
Poetry, performance, food, film, design and more
The Invisible Dog and The New York Arab Festival are thrilled to present The Alchemist’s Recipes, festival’s closing art-marathon, dedicated to alchemy and art, at Atelier Jolie.
Dedicated to the legacy of famed Moroccan visual artist and playwright Ahmed Yacoubi, ‘The Alchemist’s Recipes” comes as the closing event of New York Arab Festival this year, presented in partnership with The Invisible Dog at Atelier Jolie, and co-curated by New York based curators and theorists Sozita Goudona, and Adham Hafez.
Centered around the notion of mutability, transformation and alchemy, this 7-hours magical marathon presents several works of the Ahmed Yacoubi Collection, exhibited for the first time at Atelier Jolie, along with food, poetry, performance, and art from contemporary Arab artists, living and working in New York today. Join us for a cooking class by chef Lucien Zayan, readings by actors and poets including Amr Kotb and Andrew Riad, screenings of video and film from across the Arab region, a talk by curator and writer Omar Berrada, as well as food, drinks, fashion and design throughout the day. Film program, a concert and surprise guests to be expected!
Atelier Jolie
57 Great Jones St, New York, NY 10012
MAY 31st, 2025 11am to 6pm
TICKETS