Dashni Morad

About Dashni Morad

Dashni Morad is a Kurdish pop singer, songwriter and former TV presenter from Sulaymaniyah, and one of the best-known female voices of modern Kurdish pop. She was born in Sulaymaniyah in 1986. In the early 1990s her family fled toward Iran and later reached the Netherlands as refugees. She grew up and went to school there before returning to Kurdistan as a young woman.

Her debut album Hela Hupa (2009) was both a hit and a controversy. Its bold dance video earned her the nickname "the Shakira of Kurdistan". She also hosted youth and talk shows on Kurdistan TV. Her duet Binaz with Karwan Kamil won a Golden Record from the Institute of Music in Duhok in 2013, and she released English-language singles such as I Am (Open Your Eyes) in 2012. She writes many of her own lyrics and melodies.

From 2014 she stepped back from music to focus on humanitarian work. She founded the charity Green Kids, which supports displaced and refugee children with books and education, and she has campaigned for Yazidi survivors and for families in refugee camps. She has returned to music from time to time, for example with Her Bijî (2017), a song inspired by the poet Abdullah Goran. She remains one of the most recognisable Kurdish artists of her generation, and is known as much for her activism as for her songs.

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