The Firehouse Center for the Arts presents…

Amanda Pascali

Tickets starting at $27

Pascali’s work songs, protest numbers, lullabies and ballads about everyday struggle are resonating with a diverse global audience. With one viral video after another, she has garnered over 130k followers on Instagram. Her fans appreciate her captivating voice, poeticism and preternatural ability to find old songs that reverberate across countries and centuries. The accolades have followed: Fulbright Scholar, Artist-in-Residence at the Library of Congress, World Expo performer in Osaka, official showcase artist at Folk Alliance International, and awards from the Calandra Institute, Mid-America Arts Alliance, Kerrville Folk Festival, and Houston Arts Alliance. But perhaps more meaningfully, Pascali proves that old songs can be endlessly reshaped for new generations.

Amanda Pascali embodies the complexity of modern identity. Born to a mother from Cairo who grew up in France and an Italian father raised in Romania, she’s a mixed-race, bilingual Gen Z troubadour perpetually caught between worlds. Quoting poet Ijeoma Umebinyuo, she says, “I’m often ‘too foreign for here, too foreign for home, and never enough for both.’” Rather than lamenting this displacement, Pascali has transformed it into her artistic superpower. In her bright red teenage bedroom, she started writing songs about her life and family, later singing them at coffeehouses and motorcycle bars. Her curiosity eventually led her to Palermo on a Fulbright fellowship, where she spent two years developing To Sing and Recount (Canta e Cunta) — a digital storytelling project that translates and revitalizes Southern Italian folk songs, revealing their startling relevance to contemporary social issues worldwide.