Sahba Aminikia Among the Winners the Aga Khan Music Award

2025 Aga Khan Music Award Laureates, Source: Aga Khan Foundation

The Aga Khan Music Awards were established by His Late Highness Prince Karim Aga Khan IV in 2018. The Awards recognise and support exceptional creativity, promise, and enterprise in music performance, creation, education, preservation and revitalisation in societies across the world in which Muslims have a significant presence.

Award recipients share a prize fund of $500,000, as well as opportunities for professional development. These opportunities include commissions for the creation of new works, contracts for recordings and artist management, support for pilot education initiatives, and technical or curatorial consultancies for music archiving, preservation, and dissemination projects.

The first Music Awards ceremony took place in Lisbon, Portugal in March 2019. It was co-hosted by the Calouste Gulbenkian Foundation and the Lisbon Municipality, and brought together a constellation of the world’s leading musical talents from the Muslim world.

The second ceremony took place in Muscat, Oman in October 2022. His Highness Sayyid Bilarab bin Haitham Al Said and Prince Amyn Aga Khan presented awards to 15 laureates following two days of performances in the Royal Opera House Muscat’s House of Musical Arts.

The winners of the third cycle will be announced on 4 November 2025 and honoured at an award ceremony on 22 Novemberat London’s Southbank Centre. The ceremony will be the centrepiece of a four-day festival celebrating music from the Great East, presented by AKMA in collaboration with the EFG London Jazz Festival.

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SFCM Grad Named TED Fellow in Recognition for Work with Refugees

Sahba Aminikia’s voice just got a little louder.

The 2013 alumnus was named a TED (Technology, Entertainment, Design) Fellow in the influential organization’s 2024 class for his work with the Flying Carpet Festival, which also led him to give one of the group’s popular TED Talks this year.

Growing up in post-revolutionary Iran, Aminikia’s Baha’i faith left him at odds with the new, conservative Islamic rule. Despite being the second-largest religious group in the country, the Baha’i have been historically persecuted, a prejudice that increased after the Iranian revolution in 1979. Despite the country’s new constitution guaranteeing religious freedom for the Christian, Jewish and Zoroastrian minorities, the Baha’i went deliberately unmentioned, setting the stage for decades of human rights violations.

Aminikia left Iran at 19 for Russia, spurred by his love of Dimitri Shostakovich, before immigrating to America in 2006 to study at SFCM with David Garner, David Conte and then-chair of composition, Conrad Susa. While still a student, he got a big break thanks to one of the Bay Area’s most beloved institutions: the Kronos Quartet.

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The greatest show on Earth — for kids who need it most

I'm beyond excited to share that my TED Talk, "The Greatest Show on Earth — for Kids Who Need It Most," is now live on TED.com! This talk is deeply personal to me and reflects years of work, dreams, and collaboration through the Flying Carpet Festival, where art, music, and storytelling meet to offer joy and healing for children impacted by conflict.

In this talk, I discuss why I founded the Flying Carpet Festival and what it means to bring art to some of the most vulnerable children in the world — children growing up in areas affected by war, displacement, and social fragmentation. Many of them have known more struggle in their short lives than most of us can imagine. Yet, through the circus and the festival, these young people are discovering new ways to express themselves, build confidence, and find hope.

The Flying Carpet Festival began with a simple idea: to create a space where beauty, culture, and joy could flourish, even in the unlikeliest of places. But it’s become so much more. It’s a platform where young Syrian refugees and Turkish youth perform as artists, collaborating across cultural divides, and showing audiences that connection is possible even when society is fractured. These performances don’t just entertain; they build empathy and understanding, and they challenge us to see each other differently.

As I prepared for this TED Talk, I was reminded of the power of storytelling, of sharing a message that, I hope, resonates with everyone who believes in the transformative force of creativity. My hope is that this talk will bring more awareness to how art can be a healing force for children who have been affected by trauma and that it will encourage others to think about ways they can bring a little bit of “magic” into lives that need it.

For everyone who has been part of this journey — performers, mentors, supporters, and audiences — thank you for believing in the power of art to create change. I invite you all to watch the talk, share it, and join us in our vision for a world where every child has the opportunity to experience “the greatest show on earth.”

Thank you, TED, for giving this vision a platform, and thank you all for your support! Let’s keep spreading the magic.