kameliya Afshari

In 2008, she met someone who was to have a deciding influence on the future of her career :

Pascale Diéval-Wils, conductor of the Chœur Maîtrisien and director of the Wasquehal Conservatoire. She sat her first audition and was accepted. She spent six years there, learning the craft of the professional musician (polyphonic singing in different languages), from her voice to her image, from rehearsing a program to performing concerts and artistic projects. This 6-year adventure was the opportunity for her to discover many different musical repertoires.

In 2009, her singing projects included J. S. Bach’s Saint Matthew Passion with the Théâtre des Champs-Elysées in Paris, under the direction of Jean-Claude Malgoire. In the pouring rain, she sang la Marseillaise and le Chant des Partisans with the French Army Choir during the 2010 14th of July Parade on the Champs-Elysées.

She took part in the Choir’s tour to Poland and Portugal, where she exchanged with singers from both countries and discovered new music and cultures. She also participated in the Choeur Maîtrisien’s first album in 2011.

All these experiences quickly led her to understand that her future would inevitably be on the stage, whether singing or acting.

Kameliya is not only driven by music; she is also driven by acting.

She was the clown in her family from a young age, but it was only from the age of 13 that she began to explore her acting talent, thanks to an amazing encounter: Mr. Daullet. This teacher trained his students regularly with sketches or small improvisations that would lead to a “drama club” (involving the production of short plays in English).

At the age of 15, she learned all the lines of work in the theatre trade, including that of a stage director, during an internship at the Le Prato theatre.

To develop her voice as a solo artist, she studied lyric singing with Valérie Poivre at the Wasquehal Conservatoire when she was 16. The same year, she attended an internship in the drama section of the Regional Conservatoire of Lille with Sébastien Lenglet and Vincent Goethals as an actress. This internship paved the way for theatrical performances in both classic (Magdelon in Les Précieuses ridicules by Molière) and contemporary theatre (the little girl in le Voyage de Monsieur Périchon).

In 2012, she began a BA in musicology at the University of Lille 3.

At the same time joined Qu’Artz, an adult choir directed by Pascal Diéval with a repertoire of sacred and secular music (Monteverdi), as well as Brahms, Schubert, and Stravinsky. That same year, she conducted a choir of 60 people (Les 4 Saisons) in Wasquehal.

Her training continued at Lille Regional Conservatoire in 2013, studying lyric singing with Françoise Semellaz, participating in the Chamber Choir and attending a workshop with Nobukko Takahashi.

In 2014, she attended the singing class of Brigitte Toulon at the Roubaix conservatoire and the Atelier Lyrique that encompasses both acting and lyric singing (playing the part of a young comic stage director and that of old Marceline in an adaptation of Le Nozze di Figaro).

She pursued her theatre studies further at the drama class of Jean-Louis Bertsch at Roubaix conservatoire, which allowed her to visualize her body and bodily movement in a different manner, as well as her stage acting in its entirety (playing the part of Sanja, a rebellious teenager on the margins of a society during wartime; and the part of Maud in a play written and directed by Antoine Domingos).

She participated in jam sessions that help to enhance her vocal jazz repertoire as a complement to her prior training in lyric techniques. She worked on jazz classics, influenced by Gershwin, Etta James, Ella Fitzgerald, and Nina Simone.

Kameliya also took an interest in blues and rock n roll, with Muddy Waters, Little Walter, Howlin’ Wolf, Willie Dixon, and Chuck Berry.

Her first performances combined lyrical and jazz singing.

Kameliya sang (solo) at the Spotlight in Lille, for associations, at the Proust Festival and even in art galleries (PPGM in Roubaix).

In 2015, she recorded her first video clip as a singer and a director, with the help of Jonathan Sédivy and Alassane Sissoko. She was involved in the video project for Fauré’s Les bureaux in 2016 with Simon Fache, a famous French pianist.

Parallel to this, she traveled to London in 2015, where she studied improvisation at the Nursery’s Improv Class. She also met many interesting and helpful people who made it possible for her to sing at prestigious venues such as the Ivy Club in Leicester Square, and the Millenium Hotel. Spotted at an event organized by Chanel, she walked the runway for Azucena Cruz and Deida Acero. She returned to France a few months afterward with a new show in the pipeline that was put on at the Kino in 2016.

Following its success, she reshapes it with the help of well-known stage directors such as François Marzynski, Yves Noulez, Juliette Lemelle. 4 musicians, a sound engineer, a flight engineer, a stuffed cat, a robe and a minimalist decor: Back In Time is born. Moving from her jazz voice to an operatic one, from humor to emotions, she conquered the public of the North of France in 2018: Le Pacbo in Orchies, the Théâtre Municipal Raymond Devos in Tourcoing and the Antre 2 in Lille.