In 2015, a California based Copt and scholar Mariam Youssef started a YouTube channel called CopticWomenSing. It was a modest beginning to a North American and diasporic trend that reflected Coptic women’s increasing frustration with their liturgical exclusions in real life. On this channel, she and other Coptic women recorded themselves singing and teaching Coptic alḥan online. She also started the first ever Coptic ecclesiastical choir in the Coptic diaspora, inspiring similar choirs throughout the rest of the Coptic Orthodox diocese in Los Angeles, and beyond.

Inspired by this channel, this American Religious Sound Project exhibit is called Coptic Women Sing Too as a nod to the efforts of Coptic women like Mariam started. This project also honours all the missing and quieted voices who still have to practice forms of “sonic veiling”—that is, ensuring that their voices are not audible enough to distract men and bring ‘shame’ to their bodies— in their individual churches, dioceses, and even women’s retreat centers. This project is also a companion exhibit to the Instagram Account of the same name: Coptic Women Sing Too. This Instagram account took off in the thick of the Covid-19 pandemic, as Copts largely migrated online for community, online religious services, and even to reckon with what their Copticity and Orthodox means during a global plagues.