Farzaneh Hemmasi

Farzaneh Hemmasi is an Assistant Professor of Ethnomusicology at Columbia University's Department of Music. Her research focuses on Iranian popular music, migration, media, and politics. She earned a PhD from Columbia University in 2010 and held fellowships at the University of Pennsylvania’s Penn Humanities Forum and Columbia’s Middle East Institute. She has taught at Columbia, the University of Pennsylvania, and Hunter College. Hemmasi co-directs Columbia’s Middle Eastern Music Ensemble and is writing a book examining popular music, affect, and technological mediation in Iran and diasporas since the 1960s. She also documented sound practices of the Occupy Wall Street movement (2011).

• Education: PhD in Music (Ethnomusicology), Columbia University, 2010

Her research interests span the intersection of music with migration, technology, and political movements. Publications include work in Ethnomusicology and edited volumes on Middle Eastern cultural production. She actively performs Middle Eastern, Western classical, and popular musics.

Her academic engagements include leadership roles in university music ensembles and interdisciplinary collaborations. Current projects emphasize decolonial methodologies in ethnomusicology and the role of music in social justice movements.

Labs/Teams: Co-founder and co-director of Columbia University Middle Eastern Music Ensemble.