a bio of sorts

Naima Shalhoub is a Lebanese musician, educator, restorative justice practitioner and cultural steward born and based on Ohlone land in the Bay Area California. Through sound and various forms of story-telling she seeks to create an atmosphere that invites us closer to sacred remembrance, justice and healing. 

Naima has opened for renowned scholars and musicians such as Angela Davis, Cornel West, Zap Mama, and Les Nubians. Her music and work has been featured in publications such as the San Francisco Chronicle, Al Jazeera, KQED Arts, East Bay Express, KALW, Pop Matters, San Francisco Classical Voice, Electronic Intifada and Arab News.

She has toured internationally and performed in spaces such as the Great American Music Hall, Metro el Madina, Yoshi’s and San Quentin State Prison. Naima’s debut album Live in San Francisco County Jail, was recorded in 2015 with incarcerated women she sat with in circle for weekly music and freedom sessions for one year leading up to the recording, discussing the racial and economic injustices entrenched in the united states’ carceral systems.

Naima’s most recent album, Siphr, conceptualized in an apartment in Beirut and released in 2020 thanks to an artist residency with Women's Audio Mission and support from Restoration Village Arts, 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 Palestinian-American MC, producer and multi-instrumentalist and long-standing musical collaborator, the music videos for the record were also filmed by Kazaleh, and covered from outlets such as Pop Matters and Scene Noise. She is also a proud member of The Shadow Band, a collective of musicians together for over a decade that formed the band in November 2023 in response to the genocide in Gaza.

Drawing from her ancestral and cultural origins, which span Lebanon, Sierra Leone and California–and citing influences from Ziad Rahbani to Mercedes Sosa, Billie Holiday and Fairouz–Naima’s music is situated in a lineage of soulful, live instrumentation, and global liberation movements. Her work often highlights the woven fabric of indigenous freedom movements from Palestine, Lebanon, South Africa, Turtle Island, the African diaspora and beyond. Within this fabric she envisions art as story-telling; a vessel of weaving interconnection, voice, wisdom, remembrance, agency and power. 

Naima Shalhoub earned a master’s degree in postcolonial 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 taught ethnic studies classes and at a variety of colleges, speaks and performs at conferences, worked in schools holding multiple roles such as counselor, RJ coordinator and teacher, and offers regular trainings and consultations on restorative justice, relational-culture transformation and community building.

She also is a metalsmith jewelry artist, working with brass and sterling silver to create adornment for remembrance.