Firas Abou Fakher is a Lebanese composer and musician. He is best known as a composer, guitarist, and keyboardist with indie rock band Mashrou' Leila.
Biography
Firas Abou Fakher was born on April 26, 1988, in Beirut to Lebanese/Venezuelan parents. His interest in music started at an early age and he taught himself to play guitar at the age of 13. While studying architecture at the American University of Beirut, Abou Fakher co-founded Mashrou' Leila as a reaction to the lack of quality Arabic Music. He started learning the piano at age 20. Abou Fakher is a multi-instrumentalist and currently plays guitar, keyboards, bass, and percussion.
Mashrou' Leila
Abou Fakher is one of the founding members of Mashrou' Leila along with Hamed Sinno, Haig Papazian and Carl Gerges. He started playing guitar and composing songs with the band in 2008 and eventually started playing keyboard and bass after the departure of former members Omaya Malaeb and Ibrahim Badr. In 2017 Abou Fakher taught a graduate workshop at the Hagop Kevorkian Institute for Near Eastern Studies at NYU as part of Mashrou' Leila. Abou Fakher has been featured on the cover of the Middle East edition of Rolling Stone magazine as part of Mashrou' Leila.
Independent work
Firas Abou Fakher has given talks and lectures as a composer and designer at ING Creatives and has received the Areen Projects Award for Excellence in Architecture and the Omrania CSBE award. He has scored several films, 'Kaleidoscope" by Lebanese director Dania Bdeir in 2014 which received numerous awards and most recently 'LOVE' by Lebanese Director Henri Bassil which won the 'Best Narrative Short Film' Award at the Moscow Short Film Festival in 2019. In 2019 Abou Fakher performed at the Metropolitan Museum of Art as part of British artistOliver Beer'sVessel Orchestra Exhibition alongside several notable artists including John Zorn, Nico Muhly and several others. Abou Fakher composed the music and sound design for the VR experience AVRA, an installation experimenting with sensory virtual reality.
