started her dance education in 1998 with Pauline Sayhi in Cambridge. She moved to Edinburgh in 2002, and continued her education with Lorna Gow. Over the years she has taken many workshops with both national and international teachers, most notably Raqia Hassan, Yasmina, Aida Noor, Yousery Sharif and Khaled Mahmoud.
Zafirah's passion is modern egyptian style and she focuses most of her study on what the dancers are doing in cairo now and in the last decade. This does not mean she isn't inpsired by the great egyptian dancers of former eras. She is very concerned (some would say almost pedantic!) about presenting the dance as 'authentically' egyptian and culturally correct as is possible for a british woman brought up in a whole different culture to the one from which the dance orginates. Understanding arabic music is the key to understanding the dance, and she absorbs herself in it to the point that western music sounds emotionally superficial and rhythmically bland in comparison!

Learning arabic dance has inspired an interest in other world dance forms and she has dabbled in Flamenco, Bharathanatyam , Bollywood and Nepalese dance.
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