Maryam Saleh

A luminary of Egypt’s alternative music scene. Once described as a “musical supernova” by Scene Noise, Saleh is a singer, composer, actor, and poet. As the teenage frontwoman of the band Gawaz Safar in the early 2000s, she revived the decades-old protest songs of folk legend Sheikh Imam for a younger audience. She broke new creative ground with the dizzying electro beats and sarcastic poetry of 2015’s Halawella, a critically-acclaimed album she recorded with Soap Kills’ Zeid Hamdan. In 2017, she boosted her profile even further across the Middle East, North Africa and Europe with Lekhfa, an opus of haunting lyricism and transcendent psychedelia made in collaboration with musicians Tamer Abu Ghazaleh and Maurice Louca and poet Mido Zoheir. Since the late 2000s, she has also taken on memorable roles in TV, theatre, and film—including Ibrahim El-Batout’s Ein Shams (2008) and Tamer El Said’s In the Last Days of the City (2016).