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, and hard work. Sahra flourished in her professional bellydance career including working at the famous Arabic supper-club “The Cascades” in Los Angeles, California.

Through her time working at The Cascades she continued to learn more and more about the dance and the cultures in which it is based, 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, and to attain an audition for the Meridian-Heliopolis 5-star hotel.

She continuously held this 6-night a week performance contract for nearly 6 years, performing over 1600 shows in Cairo alone. During this time Sahra recorded several CD’s with her band, “Sahra Saeeda”, “Music for Egyptian Dance”, and “Layali Zaman” and several videos from her Cairo show “Sahra – Direct from Cairo”, “Ahlan, Ahlan”, and “Sahra Saeeda”.

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 (half of her Cairo orchestra and dancers), came to the USA from Egypt in 1996 and toured 4 states.

Upon finishing her research in Egypt, 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 yearly theatrical 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.

After disbanding “Ya Amar!” in 2007 Sahra designed the structure for Journey Through Egypt, a course that teaches dancers about the various styles of dance in Egypt with an anthropological 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 and researching, 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!