ALI SETHI
Writer and Musician

Ali Sethi is a Pakistani-American writer and musician whose work advances a syncretic South Asian identity. Born in Lahore, he studied as an undergraduate at Harvard and supplemented with an apprenticeship in musical and poetic forms. From 2015, Sethi has made music that playfully blurs the lines between traditional and modern, East and West. He has been a fixture on Pakistan’s Coke Studio program, collaborating with the likes of Abida Parveen, and has been a contributor to movie soundtracks and genre-busting albums, including Riz Ahmed’s ‘Swet Shop Boys’, Nicolas Jaar’s ‘Intiha’ and Carnegie Hall’s multimedia orchestral work ‘Where We Lost Our Shadows’.
In 2022 he created and performed ‘Pasoori’, which has garnered over a billion streams and was Google’s most ‘hummed-to-search’ song in the world. Sethi was named in Time’s 100 Next list, with his music praised for showing that “differences of culture, language, religion and gender do not need to be antagonistic; they can, and always have, enriched us, and given us some of our greatest works of art.”
As one of South Asia’s few openly queer pop stars, Sethi occupies a unique place in global media and arts. He is known for marshalling tradition in ways that upend binaries and allow connections where few, if any, were supposed to exist.