About Me
NAIMA SHALHOUB
MY STORY
Best known for her “at turns wistful, haunting and powerfully growling” performances, Naima Shalhoub is a Lebanese musician, educator and multidisciplinary artist passionate about sacred remembrance, healing and liberation woven throughout her work.
Naima has opened and/or played alongside renowned scholars and musicians such as Angela Davis, Cornel West, Zap Mama, Les Nubians, formidable Bay Area/Global musicians Meklit, Diana Gameros, and others. Her music has been featured in press such as the San Francisco Chronicle, Al Jazeera & AJ+, The
Mercury News, KQED, East Bay Express, Pop Matters, Scene Noise, KALW, San Francisco Classical Voice, Electronic Intifada and Arab News
Equally important in Shalhoub’s work is her commitment as an experienced social justice educator, restorative justice practitioner, and embodied healing facilitator. For over 15 years she has taught in schools, universities, led trauma-informed community healing trainings across sectors, consulted, counseled, learned from and partnered with amazing young people and adults.
Naima has toured internationally and performed at venues such as the Fox Theater in Oakland, Metro Al Madina (مترو المدينة) in Beirut, and San Quentin State Prison. Her debut album, Live in San Francisco County Jail, was recorded in 2015 with incarcerated women with whom she collaborated for a year through weekly “music and freedom” circles.
Her most recent album, Siphr, was praised by San Francisco Classical Voice as “an unbreakable chain linking freedom, captivity, joy, sorrow, pain, separation, identity, political protest, and spiritual power.” As an artist-in-residence with Women’s Audio Mission and Restoration Village Arts, Shalhoub’s music and community work have long been supported by both music and liberatory movement communities.
Naima developed the concept for Siphr during a summer in Beirut while reconnecting with her family roots. She then brought the project back to the Bay Area to collaborate with longtime Palestinian producer and musician Tairk “Excentrik” Kazaleh, who co-produced the album and helped bring her vision to life. This project led to the formation of ShadowBand, an Arabic-groove band featuring Chris Trinidad on bass, and Aaron Kierbel and Michael Reed on drums and percussion.
Honoring her birth name Grace and its Arabic translation Naima, and guided by the Most High in her life, she honors the liminal in identities and lands within her. In a postcolonial world where forgetting is a tactic of divide and conquer, she sees sacred memory as a practice of transforming toward more-healed, liberatory and just futures.