The Aga Khan Music Programme has announced its Master Jury for the Aga Khan Music Awards, which take place from 20-23 November 2025 in London in partnership with the EFG London Jazz Festival.
The Aga Khan Music Awards, currently in their third cycle, celebrate musical creativity, tradition, and innovation in cultures shaped by Islam across the world. The awards recognise exceptional talent in a broad range of musical activities with the aim of helping ensure the continuity of Muslim musical heritage while supporting and encouraging its revitalisation and renewal.
The seven members of the Master Jury are internationally recognised experts in their respective fields of music, which include performance, composition, festival direction, scholarship, and education. Together, and with complete independence, they will select winners of the 2025 awards, who will share a prize fund of $500,000 and gain access to professional development opportunities such as commissions, recordings, and support for education and preservation initiatives.
The members of the 2025 Master Jury are:
- Divya Bhatia: Mumbai-based festival programmer, producer, performing arts consultant
and actor.
- Sasan Fatemi: Iranian music scholar with deep expertise in the classical and folk music traditions of the Iranophone world.
- David Harrington: Founder, artistic director, and violinist of San Francisco’s KronosQuartet.
- Zeyba Rahman: Philanthropy executive, global arts leader, and specialist in arts grantmaking and community engagement.
- Oumou Sangaré: Celebrated multi-award-winning singer-songwriter from Mali.
- Jordi Savall: Doyen of the European early music movement, celebrated for embracing musical influences of the East.
- Ghada Shbeir: Lebanese vocalist, scholar, and choir director specialising in Middle Eastern liturgical, classical, and folk music.
“We are thrilled that such a distinguished group of jury members will be selecting our 2025 prize-winners,” said Fairouz Nishanova, Director of the Aga Khan Music Programme and the Aga Khan Music Awards. “The awards – and the music programme more broadly – have established a true community, a family, that takes inspiration from music’s power to bring cultures together and to speak passionately to our minds, hearts and souls. I look forward to celebrating the best in the world’s diverse musical languages and activities when the Master Jury reveals its decisions.”
The Aga Khan Music Awards were established in 2018 by His Late Highness Prince Karim Aga Khan IV to honour exceptional achievement across the diverse musical cultures shaped by Islam, spanning performance, composition, education, preservation and devotional practice. The awards recognise individuals, groups and institutions whose work sustains and revitalises musical traditions that promote spiritual insight, social cohesion and cultural resilience. Nominees need not be Muslims themselves, and nominations are made without consideration of religion, race, gender, or age. The Awards are governed by an Advisory Council co-chaired by His Highness Prince Rahim Aga Khan V and Prince Amyn Aga Khan, and are administered by the Aga Khan Music Programme.
For further details, interviews, or media attendance requests, please contact:
- Leticia Callista | Account Executive | leticia@curzonpr.com
- Simon Hemelryk | Account Director | simon@curzonpr.com
[High-resolution images, including of the judges, and additional materials available here.]
NOTES TO EDITORS
Event details
Aga Khan Music Awards 2025
20th-23rd November 2025
London
Tickets for the awards festival will be on sale to the public via the Southbank Centre website on 11th July.
Aga Khan Music Programme (AKMP)
Founded in 2000, the Aga Khan Music Programme (AKMP) recognises, supports and validates the critical and pivotal role of music and musicians in societies shaped by Islam. Collaborating with musicians throughout Central Asia, the Middle East, North Africa, South Asia and West Africa, the AKMP celebrates music as an elemental expression of human spirituality and a crucial means of fostering tolerance, curiosity and pluralism. While respecting and supporting music teaching and music making in traditional forms, the AKMP encourages new projects from contemporary artists whose creations are inspired but not constrained by tradition. The AKMP carries out its work through a worldwide network of partnerships with arts presenting organisations and educational institutions, as well as via
a network of music schools and educational development centres in Egypt, Kyrgyzstan, Pakistan and Tajikistan. Together, we aim to rethink the regions’ traditional master-apprentice learning model for our contemporary times, to provide learning and performance opportunities for outstanding young musicians, and to share our work with global audiences.
Web-page | Facebook | Instagram | LinkedIn | YouTube
Aga Khan Development Network (AKDN)
The Aga Khan Development Network is a group of private, non-denominational development agencies working to improve living conditions and opportunities for people in some of the poorest parts of the developing world. Its multifaceted approach includes health, education, culture, rural development, institution-building, and economic development initiatives, aiming to improve the quality of life of the people and communities it serves, and to assist individuals to become self-reliant.
Website | Facebook | Instagram | LinkedIn | X | YouTube
EFG London Jazz Festival
Now in its 33rd year, the EFG London Jazz Festival will take place from 14–23 November 2025. Over ten days and nights, musicians from across the globe will gather in London for an international celebration of music, presenting boundary-pushing performances that illuminate jazz and its influence across genres and cultures. Jazz transcends borders, weaving together diverse musical traditions and uniting communities through the universal language of music.
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Master Jury Bios
Divya Bhatia, based in Mumbai, is an independent festival programmer and producer who regularly presents and produces international music and theatre projects worldwide. Educated in India, the United Kingdom and Canada, he is the longstanding Artistic Director and Co-Producer of Jodhpur RIFF (Rajasthan International Folk Festival), India’s leading folk-jazz-roots music festival in Rajasthan. He also serves as Director of Music Museum Projects at Mehrangarh Museum Trust, Jodhpur; visiting faculty and India research partner for Applied Theatre at London’s Royal Central School of Speech and Drama; and lead facilitator for Applied Theatre and Artistic Consultant at ComplexCity with Youth for Unity and Voluntary Action (YUVA), Mumbai. He has been a Hindustani classical tabla player and a film actor, including in the 2009 film Paa and the 2015 film Talvar (released internationally as Guilty).
Sasan Fatemi is a lecturer in ethnomusicology at University of Tehran with research interests in the traditional music of Iran, Central Asia and Azerbaijan. He received his PhD in ethnomusicology from the Université de Paris-X Nanterre and has published scholarly articles on Iranian music in English, French, and Farsi. He has also been active in performance research, contributing an original composition in the old Iranian style to a compilation album, titled Sarkhâne, of historically-informed new compositions. At University of Tehran, he has been a pioneer in bringing the academic discipline of ethnomusicology into the university’s curriculum and building a cohort of faculty and students to develop it.
David Harrington is founder, artistic director, and violinist of San Francisco’s Kronos Quartet, which celebrated its fiftieth anniversary in the 2023-2024 season with Fifty for the Future, an open access collection of newly commissioned works. Through its commitment to commissioning music by living composers and collaborating with musicians representing myriad forms of traditional music around the world, Kronos has served as an inspiring model of bridge-building across musical languages, styles, and cultures. Kronos’s seventy-four recordings and more than 1,100 commissioned works comprise a unique chronicle of American and global music over half a century. Kronos’s work has been recognised by prestigious awards, including the Polar Music Prize, the Avery Fisher Prize, a Grammy, and Musicians of the Year from Musical America. In 2024, David Harrington was appointed as Kluge Chair in Modern Culture at the United States Library of Congress.
Zeyba Rahman is a philanthropy executive, global arts leader, and specialist in arts grantmaking and community engagement. For more than a decade, she served as director of the Doris Duke Foundation’s Building Bridges Program, which supports projects that use the arts to strengthen mutual understanding between American Muslim communities and their neighbors. Prior to joining the Doris Duke Foundation, Ms. Rahman served in a variety of senior curatorial consulting, and advisory roles for international music and arts festivals, museums, public arts programmes, and broadcasting networks, among them the Fes Festival of World Sacred Music, Brooklyn Academy of Music, Metropolitan Museum of Art, and Asia Society. She currently serves on the board of directors of Grantmakers in the Arts, which provides professional development resources for arts grantmakers. Zeyba Rahman served on the inaugural AKMA Steering Committee in 2019.
Oumou Sangaré is a celebrated Malian singer-songwriter widely known as ‘the Songbird of Wassoulou’. A school dropout who sang to help her mother support the family, she won an inter-kindergarten singing competition at the age of five and released her first album Moussolou (‘Women’) in 1990 with renowned Malian arranger Amadou Ba Guindo. Sangaré released seven more solo albums and performed at prestigious venues worldwide, including Melbourne Opera, the Opéra de la Monnaie and the Oslo World Music Festival. She has won numerous music awards, including a Grammy for Best Pop Collaboration with Vocals in 2011 for Herbie Hancock’s album Imagine. She was named a Goodwill Ambassador of the Food and Agriculture Organization of the United Nations in 2003, and a Commandeur de l’Ordre des Arts et des Lettres by the French Ministry of Culture in 1998.
Jordi Savall is a doyen of the European early music and historically-informed performance movement. A peerless performer on the viola da gamba and other early European instruments, Maestro Savall founded, together with his late wife, Montserrat Figueras, the early music ensembles Hespèrion XXI (1974), La Capella Reial de Catalunya (1987) and Le Concert des Nations (1989). His concert programmes have illuminated historical links between Europe and the East, and frequently feature guest artists from Eastern musical traditions. In 2008 Savall was appointed European Union Ambassador for intercultural dialogue and was named Artist for Peace under the UNESCO Good Will Ambassadors programme. Savall has released more than 230 recordings that span medieval, Renaissance, Baroque, and Classical music, with a special focus on Hispanic and Mediterranean musical heritage. His many awards include the Léonie Sonning Music Prize and the Praetorius Music Prize.
Ghada Shbeir is a critically acclaimed vocalist, scholar, composer and author. She holds a PhD in musical sciences as well as a diploma in Arabic singing from the Holy Spirit University of Kaslik, Lebanon. She is also winner of the Best Arabic Song Competition, the BBC World Music Award for the Middle East and North Africa, and the International Prize for the performance of the classical Andalusian lyrical song form muwashshah. A teacher of Arabic singing and artistic director of the Oriental Arabic Choir at the Holy Spirit University of Kaslik, Shbeir released numerous recording projects and books, among them Al Mouashahat, an academic curriculum for oriental singing students, and Al Maqamat Al Arabiya, an academic curriculum for vocalists studying Arabic maqām. As a researcher, Shbeir has studied Syriac liturgical music and notated over 700 Maronite and Catholic Syriac chants.
