A Lifelong Dancer

Sahra Saeeda has been a dancer almost all her life.

Starting with Modern Dance, she trained throughout college to audition for Martha Graham’s dance company, unfortunately, to no avail.

Shortly after her refusal she stumbled upon arabic music and bellydance and found a new direction.

Through a series of fantastic coincidences and good luck, Sahra started her professional bellydance career working at an Arabic nightclub known as The Cascades in Los Angeles, California.

Dancing in Egypt

Through her time working at The Cascades she continued to learn more and more about the dance, and pursued a Masters degree in Dance Ethnology. Through this program she had the good fortune to meet Madame Farida Fahmy, who assisted her during the research period of her Master’s in Egypt to attain a job at the Meridian-Heliopolis 5-star hotel.

She held this job for nearly 6 years, dancing shows almost every night. During this time Sahra recorded several CD’s with her band, “Sahra Saeeda”, “Music for Egyptian Dance”, and “Layali Zaman”. Sahra was honored to perform choreographies exclusively by Farida Fahmy from 1989-1991. The “Sahra Show” with 5 of her musicians and a male Folklore dancer, came to the USA from Egypt in 1996 and toured 4 states.

“Ya Amar”

Upon finishing her research, Sahra returned to the United States in 1995 to finish writing her Masters Thesis. Along with finishing her thesis, Sahra also launched a dance company “Ya Amar!” which performed several stage shows, along with local events for the next 12 years. Clips from some of these shows can be found in the videos section here on the site.

Journey Through Egypt

After disbanding “Ya Amar!” in 2007 Sahra developed the idea for Journey Through Egypt, a course that teaches dancers about the various styles of dance in Egypt with an athropological eye. For the past 10 years Sahra has devoted her time and schedule to spreading the vast array of knowledge she has gathered over the past 30 years of dancing, expanding JtE into a 4 part course and teaching workshops all around the world.

Sahra continues to learn and grow as a dancer, and still finds joy in every aspect of the dance. She currently teaches both dance workshops, lectures, and the Journey Through Egypt course. To learn more about booking Sahra in your city, visit our Booking page!