Dancer, choreographer, and instructor Miriam Peretz specializes in traditional, mystical and contemporary dances from the Silk Road (Persia & Central Asia) and beyond. Her style draws inspiration from her diverse dance background in Persian, Central Asian, Flamenco, and Contemporary dance as well as her training in various Martial Art forms. Miriam has been a principal dancer, assistant director and choreographer for many years with Ballet Afsaneh dance company. She currently performs with her own dance company, Nava Dance Collective as well as performs as a featured soloist in festivals throughout the U.S, Middle East and Europe. Miriam’s love of dance has led her on a lifelong journey in search for ways to use the arts as a bridge between people of different backgrounds and spiritual traditions. She sees dance as a uniquely powerful means of expressing deep emotion and spiritual yearning, and therefore the perfect embodiment of prayer

Iranian born artist Ziya Tabassian began playing the tombak (Iran percussion instrument) at the age of ten. He studied classic Western percussion, and is very active in the traditional and contemporary music scenes. As founding member of the Ensemble Constantinople, Tabassian has toured around the world. In addition to performing with the ensemble, he has recorded many albums. His first solo production, Tombak, was released in 2007 under the Ambiances Magnétiques record label. He also performs as a member of Ensemble Âstân, founded by Bashir Faramarzi in 2013.

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Efren López is a Spanish multi-instrumentalist, with a passion for strings. When he was younger, he joined a rock band as a sound assistant; it was an intense learning experience that put him in contact with everything related to musical production. Through his travels to Puerto Rico and Colombia, he began playing traditional doubled-stringed instruments. He has recorded numerous albums of Medieval and Renaissance music. In recent years, he has been specializing in Afghan rubab.

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Born in northeast Iran, Bashir Faramarzi showed, from a very early age, a strong interest in the traditional music of his native land and Azerbaijan. At the age of fifteen, he learned how to play the santur (a stringed instrument related to the zither), and afterwards enrolled in the University of Tehran as an Iranian music interpretation student. He then pursued studies in ethnomusicology in Paris, where he also carried out the recording of dutar players’ musical repertoire and literary heritage. Today he performs as a player and composer for the Ensemble Âstân, a Montreal group he founded in 2013. The ensemble’s first album, Qazalvâreh, has recently been released.

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After pursuing a career in classical ballet and jazz ballet, Sarah Hubert de Margerie began her training in Eastern dance (baladi) in 2003. Her travels to Morocco and Pakistan fueled her curiosity of this dance style. She has mastered classical and folkloric dance styles from North Africa, India, Iran and the Arabian peninsula. Passionate about Asian music, she has taken up playing the oud,an Asian lute. If that were not enough, this talented dancer has also earned her MA in Philosophy from the Université de Québec à Montréal (UQAM).