Stanford names folk singer Sima Bina 16th Bita Prize laureate

Stanford University's Hamid and Christina Moghadam Program in Iranian Studies has named Iranian folk singer, songwriter and researcher Sima Bina the laureate of its 16th Bita Prize for Persian Arts. According to the program's event page, the ceremony was scheduled for Saturday, November 7, at 6 pm, in person at Stanford. The page says Bina was born in 1945 in Khorasan and grew up surrounded by traditional Persian melodies and rhythms. Her professional career grew in the 1960s, when she began performing in public and recording albums. She has travelled to remote regions of Iran to learn folk songs from local musicians and to record and document them, building a repertoire that ranges from Kurdish lullabies to Baluchi melodies. She has also published books on Persian folk music and lectured at universities and cultural institutions around the world. The page notes that in the 1980s and 1990s, when women's voices were restricted in Iran, she organized music workshops and secretly taught Iranian women traditional music. Earlier laureates of the prize include Hossein Amanat, Shahram Nazeri and Kayhan Kalhor. Photo by PersianDutchNetwork, CC BY-SA 4.0, via Wikimedia Commons.