Esraa Warda

Habibi Festival • Nov 5, 2021

Esraa Warda is New York's emerging dance artist and educator specializing in Algerian & Moroccan traditional dance forms. A child of the Algerian diaspora, Warda is a cultural warrior advocating for the representation & preservation of North African women-led dance traditions and the decolonization of euro-centricity, orientalism, and patriarchy in dance. Warda is a product of "popular education"; a student of inter-communal transmission of oral history and muscle memory from her family's living room in Algiers. She continues with this essence both still as a student of elders and as an educator for the upcoming generations. Her dance workshops and lectures have pioneered trailsd to educational institutions such as Cornell University, Wellesley College, King's College (London), and University of Ottawa. She performs with notable North African women's groups such as Bnat el Houariyat (Marrakech) and often performs internationally in New York, Paris, Belgium, Casablanca, and London.