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
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.
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
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.
Tickets coming soon