EMEL: Everywhere We Looked Was BurningEMEL: Everywhere We Looked Was Burning

Emel Mathlouthi is a Tunisian-American singer-songwriter, composer, performer, and producer whose music has crossed time, countries, and continents.

In 2008, after her work was banned in Tunisia, she moved to Paris, where she developed her signature sound—blending voice, guitar, North African percussion, cello, and electronic textures—on her debut album Kelmti Horra (My Word Is Free).

She continued evolving with Ensen (2017) and the cinematic Everywhere We Looked Was Burning (2019). During the pandemic, she returned to Tunis to create The Tunis Diaries (2020), an acoustic album reflecting reconciliation with her roots, including “Holm (A Dream),” which became her most widely heard track, garnering over seven million views on YouTube in 15 months.

In 2023, Emel completed her fifth album, MRA, a 100% woman made album, an ode to femininity and sorority carried by a close collaboration between women artists, musicians and producers from all over the world.

Jessica Grindstaff is a New York City-based visual artist, playwright, director, and designer whose work spans theater, opera, installation, and documentary. As co-founder and artistic director of Phantom Limb Company, she creates large-scale multimedia works that dissolve the boundaries between disciplines — between image and text, performance and architecture, the intimate and the epic.

Her best-known project, the Environmental Trilogy, created with co-founder Erik Sanko, explores the human relationship to the natural world through layered theatrical and visual lenses. A committed environmentalist and activist, her practice is rooted in poetics and collage, always seeking the prismatic nature of a subject rather than a single fixed view.

Her work has engaged communities across scales — from operas with more than a hundred children in industrial spaces to broadcasts reaching sixty million viewers. She is currently developing a television series and documentary about author Margaret Wise Brown.