Carmel Farahbakhsh BIOGRAPHY

 

Carmel Farahbakhsh (they/them) is a sound artist, composer, violinist, and performer, community worker and educator. They collaborate with various creatives locally such as Darcie Bernhardt for a short film titled Nanuk &Bibi. The film was shown at Nocturne 2020, Toronto Short Film Festival 2021 and was a finalist in the 2022 Independent Short Awards International Film Festival. Carmel acted as composer and instrumentalist for Liliona Quarmyne and Mo Drescher’s performance and residency titled: Moves & Marks: tenderness-risk-boundaries, as well as worked alongside long-time collaborator Moor Mother in musicianship and artmaking. They are the chair of local artist-run centre The Khyber Centre for the Arts and are the Creative Director of K'jipuktuk (Halifax) based EVERYSEEKER festival. They are currently working on their first solo project titled Saydah Ruz.

Carmel aims to weave their sound arts practice with trauma informed education and procedural based work. They see a direct link between this community work and access to creative spaces. Carmel actively collaborates with artist-run-centres and local initiatives with the aim to create wider 2SQTBIPOC support systems locally. They are currently executive director at the Youth Project and sex educator at Venus Envy. They previously worked at South House Sexual and Gender Resource Centre.

Darcie Bernhardt and Carmel Farahbakhsh, Nanuk & Bibi, 2020