Born in Germany to an Iranian mother and a Kurdish father, Rana grew up in France, where she lives today. Music was her first encounter with Sufi spirituality, when she began playing the daf, a sacred frame drum of Kurdish origin. Sufism then became the guiding thread of her life and her main source of inspiration. This relationship with spirituality is not merely a matter of origin: whether through practice or intellectual exploration, Rana has devoted her life entirely to this single subject.

Although the artist joined a Sufi brotherhood during her adolescence, it was only in 2017 that she began bringing it onto the artistic stage. Do the Sufis not say, “A madman does not know he is mad, a wise person does not claim to be wise, and a Sufi does not say that he is Sufi”? Sufism does not only shape Rana’s thinking; it nourishes both her art and her teaching. On stage, during her performances, Rana’s dance becomes an uninterrupted ascending spiral, a movement that truly seems to lead toward the divine. In her pedagogy, spirituality remains ever-present, as Sufi dance cannot be understood outside its spiritual context. People come from all over the world to experience this authenticity.