Bio
Naima Shalhoub is an accomplished Lebanese-American vocalist, composer, performer, guitarist, pianist, band leader and arranger who creates genre-bending, healing and border-defying sounds.
Naima has opened for renowned scholars and musicians such as Angela Davis, Cornel West, Zap Mama, and Les Nubians. Her music has been featured in the San Francisco Chronicle, Al Jazeera, The Mercury News, KQED, East Bay Express, KALW, Upworthy, Pop Matters, San Francisco Classical Voice, Electronic Intifada and Arab News.
She has toured internationally and performed at venues from the Great American Music Hall to San Quentin State Prison. Naima has risen to prominence in the global music scene as an interdisciplinary artist and transformative justice leader who often works and performs in places of isolation, confinement, and incarceration. Her debut album Live in San Francisco County Jail, was recorded in 2015 with incarcerated women she led in weekly healing circles.
Naima’s 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.” Co-produced by Tarik “Excentrik” Kazaleh, internationally known Arab MC, producer and multi-instrumentalist and long-standing musical collaborator, the music videos for the record are often Ed referred to as visual poetry and were also filmed by Kazaleh.
Drawing from her ancestral and cultural origins, which span Lebanon, Sierra Leone and California–and citing influences from Billie Holiday to Mercedes Sosa, Erykah Badu and Fairouz–Naima’s music is situated in a lineage of soulful, live instrumentation, and global liberation movements.
Naima Shalhoub earned a master’s degree in post-colonial anthropology with a focus on social and cultural transformation. As a seasoned restorative justice practitioner community organizer and educator, she has spoken at TEDxLAU at the Lebanese American University of Beirut, has developed ethnic studies classes at a variety of colleges and offers regular trainings and consultations on restorative/transformative judrive and community building.
Metalsmithing arts:
Naima discovered a passion for creating handcrafted jewelry during quarantining in 2020 and launched naima grace at the beginning of 2021.
Find out more about naima grace, Naima's hand-crafted jewelry line HERE.
EPK available upon request - please contact me
