Eve Sada
Eve Georges Sada is a choral conductor and scholar whose work centers on the musical and cultural traditions of Assyrian communities, combining archival research, ethnographic fieldwork, and performance practice to document sacred and secular traditions in the Assyrian ancestral homeland of Mesopotamia (modern-day Iraq) and within diaspora communities.
Her expertise in Semitic languages enriches her interdisciplinary research, enabling close engagement with historical liturgical manuscripts, oral traditions, and textual sources. Her award-winning dissertation examines diverse chant genres of the Church of the East, one of the oldest surviving traditions of Eastern Christianity, tracing their development from the first centuries of Christianity to the present. Eve’s research focuses on documenting and preserving Assyrian music, dance, and cultural expressions, highlighting their vital role in sustaining collective memory, cultural identity, and heritage.
After receiving her doctorate from the University of Oklahoma, Sada served as a postdoctoral fellow in Spirituality and The Arts research initiative at the Center for the Study of World Religions at Harvard Divinity School from (2023-26). In her research reflection “Commemoration as Culture: Dukhrana and Shahra Rituals in Assyrian Tradition”, she explores the continuity between ancient Mesopotamian ritual practices and living Assyrian traditions, demonstrating how ritual performance and collective memory preserve cultural continuity across centuries.
Her work lies at the intersection of ethnomusicology, dramaturgy, performance studies, and Mesopotamian cultural history. She has contributed to the historical, musical, and cultural development of the new opera production Gilgamesh. The opera was previewed at the Harvard Museum of the Ancient Near East (Mesopotamia Gallery) in November 2025 and premiered in Los Angeles in March 2026.
Eve is currently developing a monograph on the chant traditions preserved in the Hudra (Khudra), drawing on Syriac liturgical manuscripts, historical texts, oral traditions, and musical analysis to examine the development and transmission of Church of the East chant traditions.
Also See:
Sacred Sounds: Assyrian Chant Legacy