Biography.

Nano Raies is a Syrian-American singer, composer, songwriter, and artivist based in Paris. Her genre-fluid pop is a cinematic journey, built on restless inventiveness — Arabic maqam and Western classical meeting in the same breath, with jazz, Brazilian music, and pop running through them. Her songs tear into patriarchy and capitalism, and sing women toward freedom.

She was born in Homs, Syria, to a mother who painted — who won first place in a competition of more than 5,000 and never got to build a life around it. “She never dared to be a rebel,” Nano has said, “but she raised one. She gave me the wings she never got to use.” By five, Nano was at the piano. The household moved between Rachmaninov and Umm Kulthum, between Schubert and Fairuz, between Abdel Wahab and Tchaikovsky — and somewhere in that collision, a voice was being formed. Rachmaninov never left her: his melodies and piano writing still run beneath her own.

In Aleppo she found Arax Chekijian, a voice teacher she has never left. When Syria fractured and Chekijian moved to Damascus, Nano got on a bus every Wednesday — Homs to Damascus, one hour of singing, then back. Then Lebanon. Then Boston. Then a screen. Since 2004, through war and displacement and three continents, the lesson has never stopped. It is the most precise measure of who she is.

She was building another life in parallel: a Bachelor’s in architecture in Aleppo, then a Masters with Distinction in the United Kingdom. The war ended the parallel. “When the war broke out,” she has said, “I witnessed my family lose everything, and friends and people dying. At that moment I understood that my dream of having a career in music was the only thing worth living for and the only thing that no one could take away from me.” She left architecture behind and became the first Syrian woman to graduate from Berklee College of Music — called by PRI/The World “one of the most gifted musicians Berklee had for this historic musical moment.”

Exile became her subject. In French, demeure is home; demeurer, to remain. Her single “Oh Ma Demeure” follows the endless search for a home that has been lost, and finds it in the only place left — within. Sung in Arabic and French over Satie’s Gnossienne No. 1, its improvisation journeys through maqams while staying rooted in Nawa Athar. It drew Grammy community recognition.

Her music is not just art — it is activism. Her Arabic cover of The Beatles’ “Drive My Car,” celebrating Saudi women’s historic right to drive, was covered by CNN, Haaretz, The National, PRI, and more than fifteen international outlets, and personally endorsed by Geoff Emerick — the Beatles’ engineer on Abbey Road, Sgt. Pepper’s, and Revolver — and by Norman Lebrecht of Slipped Disc, who wrote that he preferred it to the original. “Thawret Shaab,” her Arabic rendition of “Bella Ciao,” was played again and again in Baghdad’s Tahrir Square during the Iraqi uprising. “The Prayer” carried original Arabic lyrics honoring the tenth anniversary of the Syrian revolution.

She has performed at prestigious venues such as Lincoln Center, Brooklyn Academy of Music, Wolf Trap, the Smithsonian Freer|Sackler Galleries, New Morning in Paris, and the Shaikh Ebrahim Center in Bahrain, and at the World Bank, where she gave the first musical performance ever held there. At UNICEF Headquarters she sang in support of Greta Thunberg and fifteen other young climate activists filing a landmark complaint before the UN Committee on the Rights of the Child. She has shared the stage with renowned artists such as Simon Shaheen, Pink Martini, the late Bassam Saba, and Kinan Azmeh, and has performed as soprano soloist with the New York Arabic Orchestra.

As an actress, she trained in the Meisner Technique at the William Esper Studio under Barbara Marchant. She played the Queen in the world premiere of Omar Offendum’s hip-hop musical Little Syria, appeared in the short film Sherman by Lebanese-American director Darine Hotait, and joined an A-list cast in Syria’s 2026 Ramadan series Matbakh El Madeenah, directed by Rasha Sherbatji.

Wherever she lands, Nano Raies makes music that refuses to obey.