Huda Asfour is a Palestinian oud and qanun player, composer, educator, social entrepreneur, and engineer. Born into a musical family, she began her formal musical training at 13, and later studied at the National Conservatory of Music in Gaza and the Edward Said Music Conservatory in Ramallah, where she was mentored by master oud player Khaled Jubran.

She also studied with qanun (zither) virtuoso Said Rajab in Cairo. Asfour has collaborated with numerous musicians and artists from around the world, and was a co-founder of Jehar, a project that, as Asfour explained, “reintroduced tunes that represent our identity, but in new arrangements that represented us as youngsters connected to global music in the early 2000s.” Asfour has released two studio albums—most recently, Kouni (Be), for which she received a production grant from the Arab Fund for Arts and Culture—and an original fifteen-minute score for the short film Blue Dive by Mostafa Youssef.

She has also collaborated with the Sri Lankan-American poet Gowri Koneswaran on Yasmeen, a multimedia dance performance. Asfour is the co-founder of two arts initiatives, the DC Palestinian Film and Arts Festival and the Mashriq Maghreb Jam sessions. She is currently an adjunct professor of biomedical engineering at George Washington University, in Washington D.C., where her research focuses on biomedical imaging and signal processing.