We dream of a festival that stands to our present reality.
Emruz is an invitation for experimentation. This Festival is an opportunity to create courageous work. Iranian artists, Shadi Ghaheri and Niloufar Nourbakhsh alongside Kazem Ghouchani, Development and Production Director co-curated the first edition of Emruz Festival (2019), which was designed to illuminate the work of Iranian identifying artists living inside and outside the United States.
Emruz Festival is a celebration of independent theatre, dance, music, film, and performance art with the goal of illuminating the daring works of emerging Iranian Artists.
Throughout our first-ever festival which happened in April 2019, Emruz Festival featured 16 shows from emerging and independent Iranian artists in the disciplines of theater, dance, music, film and more in six days.
Our story
Emruz امروز in Farsi means today. Emruz Festival came about through a need for an independent artist-run festival to showcase the work of Iranian Identifying Artists who live in different parts of the world. Our goal is to create a space for artists and the community to connect and build relationships based on shared vision and values. Emruz Festival is a forward-thinking project. A pro-active community is central to everything we do.
Our collective was able to truly bring our Iranian and American community of artists, friends, and supporters, closer together. As we reached out to our community for support, we realized that the demand for such a festival - independently designed and curated - was higher than what we expected. Today, we are grateful for our community’s kindness and support.
We are proud to announce that with your help, the second year of the Emruz Festival will take place at Rattlestick Playwrights Theater in first week of May 2022.
our mission
Emruz believes in Diversity, Equality and Inclusion. We are here to amplify the voices of Iranian identifying artists by offering transformative support. We are dedicated to providing artists with space, collaborators, audiences, and the freedom to design and drive their own creative processes.
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Core team
Niloufar Nourbakhsh, Co-Curator
Described as “stark” by WNPR and “darkly lyrical” by the New York Times, a winner of the Second International Hildegard competition and a 2019 recipient of OPERA America’s Discovery Grant, Niloufar Nourbakhsh’s music has been performed at numerous festivals and venues including Carnegie Hall, Lincoln Center, and the Kennedy Center. A founder and director of Iranian Female Composers Association, Nourbakhsh is a strong advocate of music education. She is currently a Teaching Artist Associate for composition students of N.Y. Philharmonic’s Young Composers program and teaches piano at Brooklyn Music School, while finishing her doctorate at Stony Brook University.
Shadi Ghaheri, Co-Curator
Shadi is a director and choreographer from Tehran, Iran based in New York. She has directed Lucretia (HERE), Last Days of Judas Iscariot (Williams College), Shahr-e-Farang (Spectrum NYC) The Girl is Chained, Death of Yazdgerd, Titus Andronicus, and choreographed Passion (Yale School of Drama). Other Credits, The Slow Sound of Snow (Yale Cabaret). She co-curated a four-play season, directing The Trojan Women, and Lear (Yale Summer Cabaret). Shadi holds an MFA in directing from Yale School of Drama and a BA from Tehran’s Shahid Beheshti University, where she was the first female president of the University Theatre Club. There, she directed Art and Stranger walking in my room. Shadi was a 2016 Paul and Daisy Soros Fellow and the 2017-2018 directing fellow at Rattlestick Playwright Theatre.
Kazem Ghouchani, Development and Production Director
Kazem (they/them/their) is a New York-based Development and Marketing professional with over 5 years of experience in community building and cultural programming. They hold an MBA from Hult International Business School with a passion for developing cultural programs for grassroots initiatives and communities. Promoting social justice has always been a driving force that has pushed them to look for ways to use art as a medium to build diverse communities. As a queer atheist, from Tehran, Kazem is currently serving as the Development & Production Director of Emruz Festival and the Major Gifts Manager at The Actors Fund of America.
Daryl Bunyan, Assistant Production Manager
Daryl is an actress by necessity, and an event coordinator/marketing manager for the Artist Co-Op by survival. She graduated from Syracuse University with a dual B.A. in English & Textual Studies and International Relations, and has since been on a thriving journey of finding her passion for communities and cultures, and bringing them together in the name of art and creativity.