Dua Saleh
Girls Rock NC is incredibly thrilled to be hosting a conversation with vocalist, poet & actor Dua Saleh (they/them) in collaboration with Duke Performing Arts Center.
This event is geared towards girls, trans youth, and gender nonconforming youth ages 12-24. No registration is required. Attendees will have an opportunity to ask Dua questions about their path to music, their influences, their artistic process, and more.
The conversation will be taking place outdoors under the Pavilion at Durham Central Park on Tuesday, October 12th at 2:30 PM. The Durham Pavilion is an outdoor covered space with smooth concrete floors. Water and light refreshments will be provided. Masks are encouraged.
Saleh will also be performing at The Pinhook in Downtown Durham, hosted by Duke Performances, on Wednesday, October 13th at 8pm. Tickets can be found at: https://dukeperformances.duke.edu/events/dua-saleh/
If you have any questions, feel free to reach out to info@girlsrocknc.org
From Pinhook:
Minneapolis-based vocalist, spoken-word poet, and actor Dua Saleh began recording music only two years ago, garnering immediate acclaim with the release of 2019’s Nūr — meaning “the light” in Arabic. Saleh (who identifies as gender non-binary and goes by they/them pronouns) followed the next year with Rosetta: a genre-bending EP whose title pays homage to pioneering rock guitarist Sister Rosetta Tharpe, blending warm vocals with raw hip-hop passages and haunting, otherworldly electronics.
For Saleh — a Sudanese native, who fled the country with their family as a child to escape civil war — these musical excursions reflect a life spent working across different kinds of divisions: borders, media, identities, and protest lines.
Dua Saleh comes to Durham as part of Duke Performances’ Building Bridges series, which since 2018 has showcased the work of US-based Muslim artists who engage with questions of personal and spiritual identity across a range of genres: from the traditional (maqam, Gnawa) to the contemporary (hip-hop, jazz, R&B, punk). At The Pinhook, Saleh brings this hybridity of perspective as a queer Muslim Sudanese-American artist to bear, in a way that acknowledges but ultimately transcends these classifications. The result is a music deeply in conversation with their African ancestry and the future possibilities of the diaspora: a sound that collapses the distance between global and local, personal and political.
