Basya is widely acclaimed as a songwriter , musician and performing artist. She is perhaps best known for her group, Pharaoh’s Daughter, a 7-piece world music ensemble that travels effortlessly through continents and language with a genre-bending sound. Basya’s earthy, soulful, beautiful voice rings out over the oud, strings, and keys that all blend together to form a vibrant vision of a new Middle East.

Basya is a graduate of the cantorial school at the neo-hasidic Aleph program (Jewish Renewal) and served for over a decade as Hazzan and  musical director at Romemu NYC and Romemu Brooklyn, an ecstatic, deep mind body spirit community.  

As an artist, she has released nearly 10 albums of music and is working on various projects all which could be explored on her site basya.com, five of which with Pharaoh’s Daughter.  Others for example “Songs of Wonder,” her settings of Abraham Joshua Heschel’s poetry to music, are chamber arrangements for original compositions to the Yiddish philosophical poetry of AJ Heschel interwar Poland.  Her following  album “Dumiyah,” was reviewed by Leonard Cohen as “so fresh and so familiar as the work of the heart always is.”  

Much of her recent work has been in collaboration. As an artist, mother and cantor over the last 13 years, many of her projects had seeds planted from her time in the summer on the Island. The most recent was a new musical exploration of Friday night prayers cultivated through Rabbi Shaul’s vast experience with old time Banjo tunes, and Basya’s facility for setting melodies to Kabbalat Shabbat. That home grown result is “Kabbalachia,” a collection of prayers recorded at the Shul, and often exuberantly played and sung on the back deck on Friday nights. Visit Kabbalachia.com for those melodies. Stay tuned for “Better than Wine,” a song of songs collection and a collaboration with Eden Pearlstein around the teachings of Rabbi Nachman of Breslov called, “Songs from the Void.”