One sentence bio

Nemat Battah is a Palestinian-Jordanian singer, oud player, composer and educator, based in Finland.

One paragraph bio

Nemat Battah is a Palestinian-Jordanian singer, oud player, composer, and educator based in Helsinki, Finland, where she is a lecturer and Vice Head of the Global Music Department at the Sibelius Academy. Trained in traditional Arabic music, her artistic work explores experiences of transgenerational war trauma as a person of Palestinian heritage whose family was forced into exile from Palestine to Jordan in 1948. Through her compositions and performances, she navigates questions of memory, displacement, and belonging, while also collaborating with internationally renowned artists in Finland and abroad. Her upcoming musical projects further explore her identity as an Arab migrant and reflect on her personal relationship to complex trauma (C-PTSD) and processes of healing, using music as a space for reflection, resilience, and transformation.

Detailed bio

Nemat Battah is a Palestinian-Jordanian singer, oud player, composer, and educator based in Helsinki, Finland, where she is a lecturer and Vice Head of the Global Music Department at the Sibelius Academy. Trained in traditional Arabic music, she has been singing songs from the Arabic classical and folk repertoire since the age of eight. In 2013 she began playing the oud, which has since become a central part of her musical expression. She has collaborated with internationally renowned artists in Finland and abroad.

Alongside performing traditional repertoire, Nemat composes her own music, exploring themes of memory, displacement, and transgenerational war trauma as a person of Palestinian heritage whose family was forced into exile from Palestine to Jordan in 1948. In her compositional process, storytelling and lyrics often lead the musical development; she begins by reflecting on the narrative she wishes to convey, and the rhythm of the poetry frequently shapes the rhythmic identity of the song itself. Her compositions draw on the vocabulary and ornamented rhythmic cycles of Arabic, Middle Eastern, and North African musical traditions while engaging in intercultural dialogue and collaboration.

She collaborates with kantele player Juulia Salo, with whom she performs and composes music drawing on Arabic maqamat and Nordic musical traditions, including a children’s repertoire titled Sabatuulen Matka. She is also part of the trio Wishamalii with pianist Kari Ikonen, inventor of the Maqiano, and Ethiopian percussionist Abdissa Assefa, performing Arabic traditional repertoire alongside their own compositions. Her upcoming collaborative musical project explores her identity as an Arab migrant and reflects on experiences of trauma and healing, using music as a space for reflection, community, resilience, and transformation.

Through her work at the Sibelius Academy, Nemat remains engaged in music and community projects in Finland and internationally, including collaborative workshops with immigrant communities in Jordan in 2023 and 2024.


Image gallery |Download high-resolution files