The Palestinian Folk Music Archive is a digital platform established by Serena Rasoul designed to preserve, connect, and revitalize Palestinian folk songs before they disappear. Drawing from an existing collection of field recordings, the project will combine these materials with a crowdsourcing site where Palestinians everywhere can upload recordings of their parents and grandparents singing the heritage songs of their childhoods. Each contribution transforms private memory into a shared archive–an act of remembrance, resistance, and continuity.
Serena Rasoul is an ethnomusicologist, artist, and cultural advocate whose work explores the relationship between sound and continuity. She is a PhD student in Ethnomusicology at Columbia University, where her research engages Palestinian folklore and oral traditions as active, intergenerational knowledge systems conveying the connection between land, community, and social life. Serena’s work bridges scholarship and creative practice, using community-based projects that refuse erasure and amplify lived experience. She has held positions as Resident Fellow at Harvard Divinity School and Community Engagement Specialist at the Smithsonian National Museum of Asian Art.
EXPLORE | The Palestinian Folk Music Archive
