Aga Khan Music Awards

Divya Bhatia, based in Mumbai, is an independent festival programmer and producer who regularly presents and produces international music and theatre projects worldwide. Educated in India, the United Kingdom and Canada, he is the longstanding Artistic Director and Co-Producer of Jodhpur RIFF (Rajasthan International Folk Festival), India&rsquo;s leading folk-jazz-roots music festival in Rajasthan. He also serves as Director of Music Museum Projects at Mehrangarh Museum Trust, Jodhpur; visiting faculty and India research partner for Applied Theatre at London's Royal Central School of Speech and Drama; and lead facilitator for Applied Theatre and Artistic Consultant at ComplexCity with Youth for Unity and Voluntary Action (YUVA), Mumbai. He has been a Hindustani classical tabla player and a film actor, including in the 2009 film&nbsp;Paa&nbsp;and the 2015 film&nbsp;Talvar&nbsp;(released internationally as&nbsp;Guilty).&nbsp;

Divya Bhatia, based in Mumbai, is an independent festival programmer and producer.

Divya Bhatia

Sasan Fatemi&nbsp;is a lecturer in ethnomusicology at the University of Tehran, with research interests in the traditional music of Iran, Central Asia and Azerbaijan. He received his PhD in ethnomusicology from the Universit&eacute; de Paris-X Nanterre and has published scholarly articles on Iranian music in English, French and Farsi. He has also been active in performance research, contributing an original composition in the old Iranian style to a compilation album, titled&nbsp;Sarkh&acirc;ne,&nbsp;of historically-informed new compositions.&nbsp;At the University of Tehran, he has been a pioneer in bringing the academic discipline of ethnomusicology into the university&rsquo;s curriculum and building a cohort of faculty and students to develop it.

Sasan Fatemi is a lecturer in ethnomusicology at the University of Tehran.

Sasan Fatemi 

David Harrington&nbsp;is founder, artistic director, and violinist of San Francisco&rsquo;s Kronos Quartet, which celebrated its 50th anniversary in the 2023-2024 season with Fifty for the Future, an open-access collection of newly commissioned works. Through its commitment to commissioning music by living composers and collaborating with musicians representing myriad forms of traditional music around the world, Kronos has served as an inspiring model of bridge-building across musical languages, styles and cultures. Kronos&rsquo;s 74 recordings and more than 1,100 commissioned works comprise a unique chronicle of American and global music over half a century. Kronos&rsquo;s work has been recognised by prestigious awards, including the Polar Music Prize, the Avery Fisher Prize, a Grammy, and Musicians of the Year from&nbsp;Musical America.&nbsp;In 2024, Harrington was appointed Kluge Chair in Modern Culture at the United States Library of Congress.

David Harrington is founder, artistic director, and violinist of San Francisco’s Kronos Quartet.

David Harrington

Zeyba Rahman&nbsp;is a philanthropy executive, global arts leader, and specialist in arts grantmaking and community engagement. For more than a decade, she served as director of the Doris Duke Foundation&rsquo;s Building Bridges Program, which supports projects that use the arts to strengthen mutual understanding between American Muslim communities and their neighbours. Prior to joining the Doris Duke Foundation, Rahman served in a variety of senior curatorial consulting and advisory roles for international music and arts festivals, museums, public arts programmes and broadcasting networks, among them the Fes Festival of World Sacred Music, Brooklyn Academy of Music, Metropolitan Museum of Art, and Asia Society. She currently serves on the board of directors of Grantmakers in the Arts, which provides professional development resources for arts grantmakers. Rahman served on the inaugural AKMA Steering Committee in 2019.

Zeyba Rahman is a philanthropy executive, global arts leader, and specialist in arts grantmaking and community engagement. 

Zeyba Rahman

Oumou Sangar&eacute; is a celebrated Malian singer-songwriter widely known as &lsquo;the Songbird of Wassoulou&rsquo;. A school dropout who sang to help her mother support the family, she won an inter-kindergarten singing competition at the age of five and released her first album Moussolou&nbsp;(Women) in 1990 with renowned Malian arranger Amadou Ba Guindo. Sangar&eacute; released seven more solo albums and performed at prestigious venues worldwide, including Melbourne Opera, the Op&eacute;ra de la Monnaie and the Oslo World Music Festival. She has won numerous music awards, including a Grammy for Best Pop Collaboration with Vocals in 2011 for Herbie Hancock&rsquo;s album&nbsp;Imagine. She was named a Goodwill Ambassador of the Food and Agriculture Organization of the United Nations in 2003, and a Commandeur de l&rsquo;Ordre des Arts et des Lettres by the French Ministry of Culture in 1998.

&nbsp;&nbsp;&nbsp;&nbsp;&nbsp;&nbsp;&nbsp;&nbsp;&nbsp;&nbsp;&nbsp;&nbsp;&nbsp;&nbsp;&nbsp;&nbsp;&nbsp;&nbsp;&nbsp;&nbsp;&nbsp;&nbsp;&nbsp;&nbsp;&nbsp;&nbsp;&nbsp;&nbsp;&nbsp;&nbsp;&nbsp;&nbsp;&nbsp;&nbsp;&nbsp;&nbsp;&nbsp;&nbsp;&nbsp;&nbsp;&nbsp;&nbsp;&nbsp;&nbsp;&nbsp;&nbsp;&nbsp;&nbsp;&nbsp;&nbsp;&nbsp;&nbsp;&nbsp;&nbsp;&nbsp;&nbsp;&nbsp;&nbsp;&nbsp;&nbsp;&nbsp;&nbsp;&nbsp;&nbsp;&nbsp;&nbsp;&nbsp;&nbsp;&nbsp;&nbsp;&nbsp;&nbsp;&nbsp;&nbsp;&nbsp;&nbsp;&nbsp;&nbsp;&nbsp;&nbsp;&nbsp;&nbsp;&nbsp;

Oumou Sangaré is a celebrated Malian singer-songwriter widely known as ‘the Songbird of Wassoulou'. 

Oumou Sangaré

Jordi Savall&nbsp;is a doyen of the European early music and historically-informed performance movement. A peerless performer on the viola da gamba and other early European instruments, Maestro Savall founded, together with his late wife, Montserrat Figueras, the early music ensembles Hespèrion XXI (1974), La Capella Reial de Catalunya (1987) and Le Concert des Nations (1989). His concert programmes have illuminated historical links between Europe and the East, and frequently feature guest artists from Eastern musical traditions.&nbsp;

In 2008 Savall was appointed European Union Ambassador for intercultural dialogue and was named Artist for Peace under the UNESCO Good Will Ambassadors programme. Savall has released more than 230 recordings that span medieval, Renaissance, Baroque, and Classical music, with a special focus on Hispanic and Mediterranean musical heritage. His many awards include the Léonie Sonning Music Prize and the Praetorius Music Prize.

Jordi Savall is a doyen of the European early music and historically-informed performance movement.

Jordi Savall

Ghada Shbeir&nbsp;is a critically acclaimed vocalist, scholar, composer and author. She holds a PhD in musical sciences as well as a diploma in Arabic singing from the Holy Spirit University of Kaslik, Lebanon. She is also winner of the Best Arabic Song Competition, the BBC World Music Award for the Middle East and North Africa, and the International Prize for the performance of the classical Andalusian lyrical song form&nbsp;muwashshah.&nbsp;A teacher of Arabic singing and artistic director of the Oriental Arabic Choir at the Holy Spirit University of Kaslik, Shbeir released numerous recording projects and books, among them&nbsp;Al Mouashahat, an academic curriculum for oriental singing students, and&nbsp;Al Maqamat Al Arabiya, an academic curriculum for vocalists studying Arabic&nbsp;maqām. As a researcher, Shbeir has studied Syriac liturgical music and notated over 700 Maronite and Catholic Syriac chants.

Ghada Shbeir is a critically acclaimed vocalist, scholar, composer and author.

Ghada Shbeir

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Aga Khan Music Awards 2025 Master Jury