Navid Zahraie (US)

Navid Zahraie is an artist-curator whose work in electronic music spans more than two decades as a performer, programmer, and producer. Born in Tehran, Iran, he was ten when political upheaval in the early 1990s led his family to settle in the United States, and music became his anchor.

He discovered electronic music in the late 1990s, and by the early 2000s he was DJing as Navbox and producing shows in Boston’s underground scene. In Washington, DC, he founded the event series Stranger Than Paradise in 2008. From 2013 he spent a decade curating more than 2,000 shows at Flash, a venue designed specifically for electronic music. Among them was Sunday Love, a seasonal, multi-dimensional series that paired the dance floor with weekly wellness programming and a market where people could meet and mingle, utilizing music as a vehicle for community-building.

In 2023 he founded Respekt Music, through which he has curated and produced shows for San Francisco venues and designed and opened H0L0 in New York. In 2024 he launched Picture a Wave, a New York micro-festival pairing ambient and experimental performance with live visuals. Today, through Respekt Music, he serves as talent buyer and booking manager for House of Yes in Brooklyn, overseeing the club’s programming and its off-site shows and festivals.

He holds a degree in audio engineering from Berklee College of Music and a master’s degree in arts administration from New York University, where he studied the role of culture in regenerating communities.