Dr. Donia Jarrar is a first generation Palestinian-Egyptian-American composer, pianist, bassist, singer-songwriter, improviser, producer, and educator known for her unique use of field recordings, working with oral histories and their relationship to the composition and shaping of new musical works across varying genres. She releases music under the solo moniker Phonodelica, an experimental sound project.
Born in Kuwait to a Palestinian father and an Egyptian mother, Jarrar survived and was a refugee of the first Gulf War of 1990, during which her family was exiled by the Kuwaiti government and forced to flee across borders before eventually settling in her mother’s hometown of Alexandria, Egypt. The family immigrated to New York City in 1992, but the memories of the war and Jarrar’s personal experiences as a third culture kid strongly shaped her compositional voice, leading her to explore themes of intergenerational memory, trauma, identity, exile, displacement, and cultural narrative in her work.
From April to June of 2022, Dr. Jarrar was artist-in-residence at the Arab American National Museum, where they produced and debuted their theatrical multimedia production BUTCHER, featuring Jarrar’s own experiences and their community members experiences with domestic violence and sexual assault. Dr. Jarrar worked with poet Yasmine Rukia and dancers Ava Ansari and Zaza Saad. In 2021, she was nominated for and named Palestine’s Young Artist of the Year for her large-scale interdisciplinary project, album, and sound installation Into the Ether and Out of Our Anguish/عبر الأثير, which had its opening at the AM Qattan Foundation in Ramallah in March 2022.
Her documentary opera Seamstress was awarded a Discovery Grant for female composers of opera from the National Opera Center of America, and tells the story of four women, including her students and artists from her community in Palestine, through lush chamber orchestrations, electronics, film and dance.
She received her Doctor of Philosophy and Master of Musical Arts degrees from the University of Michigan, and currently serves as a music technology and piano teaching artist with Young Musicians Foundation. Dr. Jarrar has also served as program director, counselor, and academic advisor at California Institute of the Arts, where they implemented a transfer program for low-income students between LACC and CalArts School of Music.
Dr. Jarrar is a composer-librettist member of Decameron Opera Coalition, which was recently awarded a Freddie Excellence in Opera award by NY Public Radio/WQXR. Her concert aria, produced and commissioned by Houston’s Opera in the Heights, was described as “weaving a spell of surreal mystery around a woman on the edge”. She has also worked extensively with the Southwest Asian and North African community, most recently with Leyya Mona Tawil’s experimental live performance series at Pieter Performance space, for the premiere of her piano and percussion duo with Yemeni-American installation artist and collaborator Yasmine Nasser Diaz and as a performer with the monthly queer diasporic event Discostan, curated and founded by Arshia Fatima Haq. She is also currently the only woman to be awarded First Prize in the Marcel Khalife Competition for the Young Palestinian Composer (40 and Under) for her work Border Crossings, a programmatic piece for voice, spoken word and orchestra describing their family’s flight out of Kuwait as refugees of the Gulf War.
She has been commissioned by the Doris Duke Foundation for Islamic Art and an Emmy award (Michigan Chapter) winning musician on the series Arab American Stories (2013). The film version of Seamstress also premiered at the 6th DC Palestinian Film & Arts Festival. Her music has been featured in Reorient Magazine and MidEast Tunes: Music for Social Change, and her solo piano work “Perpetual Dance” was recently released on disk and iTunes on the compilation album project Letters to Palestine. Whether recording audio samples and interviews on the streets of Cairo in Tahrir Square or between the bars of a caged turnstile at a military checkpoint, her electronic music heavily features found sound within occupied public spaces, and has been published online at Textsound and featured in documentary shorts including Egyptian filmmaker Laura ElTantaway’s “Crazy for Sisi.” Dr. Jarrar has presented at several panels, forums and festivals in the U.S. and abroad, most recently in an interdisciplinary dance and multimedia improvisational work as part of the New Arab American Avant Garde panel at DIWAN’s forum for the Arts, and her work as a translator during the January 25 Egyptian Revolution led to her being invited to present as a TEDx Fellow at the University of Michigan. She is also a juror for the Twin Cities Arab Film Festival.
Dr. Jarrar has also taught theory and piano at the Edward Said Conservatory of Birzeit University in Ramallah, as well as the non profit organization of Al-Kamandjati (the violist), where she worked with Palestinian youth from refugee camps, as well as different villages and cities across the West Bank.
She also served as a music appreciation teacher for UNRWA elementary school children in Jalazon and Qalandia refugee camps as a part of the Terre Des Hommes project “Music bridges West Bank, Italy and France,” giving workshops to United Nations Relief Works Agency school teachers on how to teach music in primary schools. Jarrar hopes to be able to make music more accessible through continued outreach, educational and organizational communal efforts.