Atiyyah Khan is a journalist, archivist, DJ and cultural historian, originally from Johannesburg but based in Cape Town. For the past 18 years, she has documented arts and culture in South Africa and her work has been published in major publications in South Africa and abroad.
Common themes in her work focus on topics like spatial injustice, untold stories of apartheid, jazz history and underground art movements.
In 2010, she was awarded the Pulitzer Fellowship earning her an MA in Arts Journalism from the USC Annenberg School for Communication and Journalism, based at the University of Southern California in Los Angeles.
She started collecting records more seriously when co-founding music collective Future Nostalgia in 2013, with a few other music lovers, as a way to come together and listen. The collective is a platform to bring ‘collectors, selectors, deejays, and diggers’ together and has hosted listening sessions all over South Africa. Outside of writing and DJing, Atiyyah worked with Zimbabwean choreographer Nora Chipaumire and toured extensively internationally; experimented with zine-making, hosted radio shows on WorldwideFM (UK) and J-Wave (Japan) and frequently works on podcasts, sonic lectures and other sound works. In January 2026, she had her first exhibition at Colomboscope in Sri Lanka, launching her latest zine A Journey Into The Sun.
Atiyyah believes the best part about music is getting to share it with others. Her sets as DJ El Corazon (the heart), digs deep into her record collection to weave in sounds including jazz, african and latin groove, middle-eastern rhythms, dub, reggae, gnawa, cumbia, taarab, soul, funk and beyond.
X: @atzushka
Instagram: @atiyyahkhan
Instagram : @futurenostalgia_