Rajae El Mouhandiz

About Rajae El Mouhandiz

Rajae El Mouhandiz is a talent with many faces and a face with many talents; as a person, speaker, performer, and as a moderator. She is simultaneously rooted in Western society and her Islamic roots. She effortlessly combines art and culture on one hand with cultural policy, a critical view on representation in the arts and media, and in-depth conversations about identity, culture, and stories, beyond stereotypes.

Rajae studied classical music at the Utrecht School of the Arts and evolved into composition, songwriting, and singing. She combines soul, jazz, and other musical influences with her Maghreb roots. In 2005, she started her own label Truthseeker records, which she transformed into Kahina Productions in 2015. She released the albums Incarnation, Hand of Fatima, the EP Watani, and the single Gracefully.

Her short documentary film HOPE! was nominated for the NFF award. She contributed to the international exhibition MUSLIMA and gave a TEDx talk on the power of identity and music. She created a television version of this talk for KRO Recht uit het Hart. Rajae initiated the theater production Hijabi Monologen NL from Ireland and New York. This was nominated for a Golden C by the Fund for Cultural Participation.

In 2017, Rajae was included in the new creators’ trajectory of the Performing Arts Fund to develop her own signature in music theater in the Netherlands, Morocco, and the United States. In 2017, she created the research performance Home, Displaced. In 2018-2019, she created and toured with Home, Displaced #2, a solo music theater production of 70 minutes, about the space women can and may occupy, and then translated it into an exhibition: Modest Fashion: An International Phenomenon in Art and Fashion.

In 2019, Rajae launched the Ellae Foundation, to continue realizing artistic productions and to help bridge the gender and cultural gap in the arts and culture sector. While developing her interdisciplinary signature as an artist, she was also an advisor for Cultuurnota Utrecht & the Council for Culture.

Rajae El Mouhandiz is an Ariane de Rothschild Legacy Fellow and for the past 12 consecutive years, she has been listed in the arts and culture section of the annual edition of the 500 most influential Muslims in the world.

When she is not curating for NITE hotel, she is working on the development of Ellae. Meanwhile, she is also the deputy director of Caravane Earth. She is regularly invited to deliver keynotes and guest lectures about her creative process and practice.