Iranian Students of California (ISC)

The ISC proudly invites you to watch the live stream of performances from our Doornavazi Music Festival. The festival features home-recorded musical performances by students and graduates from all across the U.S. plus talks and speeches by renowned cultural and scholar figures such as Dr. Hossen Omoumi, Dr. Abbas Milani, Kambiz Roshanravan and Mahsa Vahdat, in addition to special performances by guest musicians.

The Doornavazi festival is made possible through generous donations from the Hamid and Christina Moghadam Program in Iranian Studies and the Persian Student Association (PSA) at Stanford university, the Rahimian Family Foundation in Sacramento, and the Jordan Center for Persian Studies in University of California, Irvine.

The festival will be live-streamed on YouTube on Feb 27th and 28th from 4-6PM PST time.

Please RSVP below to receive updates regarding the programming.

Meet the Organizers

Parsoa Khorsand - Executive Director

Parsoa is a Bioinformatics Ph.D student at UC Davis where he is also the president of the Iranian Student Association. A self-taught pianist and guitarist, he has performed music with various small groups and currently plays in a pop/rock band with fellow Iranian musicians from UC Davis. He occasionally records his own songs. As a founding member of the ISC, he also serves as the head of the Music Committee and has long been planning for this festival.

Hesam Abedini - Curatror

Hesam is a composer, vocalist, improviser, and educator residing in Irvine, California. His music crosses the boundaries between idioms as wide as contemporary music, Iranian classical music, jazz and free improvisation. Currently, Hesam is writing his PhD dissertation on “Post Inter-Cultural Music” at the University of California, Irvine, where he studies Integrated Composition, Improvisation and Technology. He is the founding member of Sibarg Ensemble and an associate faculty in music at Saddleback College.

Parinaz Yazdanparast

Parinaz received her Bachelor’s in Music Technology with a minor in Audio production from George Mason University. She is currently pursuing her Master’s in Music Technology at CalArts. She is a Tombak player as well as a DJ and audio technician. Her works vary from making remixes and Persian fusion mixes to abstract compositional pieces for film to video editing and audio programming! She aspires to do both sound design and composition for films.

Adib Ghorbani

Adib is a pianist, composer, improviser, actor, director, writer, and educator. He is currently a PhD student in ICIT (Integrated Composition, Improvisation, and Technology) at the University of California, Irvine. His music spans a wide variety of genres including classical music, experimental music, rock music, contemporary music, free improvisation, opera and theatrical music as well as a new genre of his own, called electro-musical mime.

Sassan Yousefie

Sassan is an architect and a business major graduate. He is a classically trained pianist but has switched styles towards jazz and pop over time. Sassan has played in various bands and has composed music for several theatrical and stage productions. At the moment, he is recording and publishing his music under the moniker of Jazal Band.