Nouara, born Zohra Ghozlane in 1948 in Mizrana in the Tigzirt commune of Greater Kabylia, is one of the principal post-1970s women's voices of contemporary Kabyle song. She began performing in the early 1970s in Algiers and on Algerian radio, alongside the broader generation that included Cherifa, Djamila, and the early commercial recording careers of Idir and Aït Menguellet.
Her musical work moved across the spectrum of contemporary Kabyle production: traditional repertoire on the model of Cherifa's unaccompanied solo song; modern songwriting in the Idir-Aït Menguellet ensemble register; explicitly political composition in the post-1980 Berber-Spring period. Her output of the late 1970s and early 1980s was a substantive contribution to the women's-coded politicisation of Kabyle popular music in that decade.
The 1990s civil war drove her, like many of her generation, into French exile; she lived principally in Paris from the mid-1990s onwards, continuing to record and to perform in the Kabyle and broader Maghrebi diasporic circuits. Her voice has been a continuous presence on Berber-language media — Beur FM in Paris, BRTV and Berbère Télévision — across the subsequent thirty years.
The contemporary recovery of women's contributions to the modern Kabyle musical sphere has elevated Nouara's standing alongside Cherifa, Taos Amrouche, and Fadhma Aith Mansour as one of the principal twentieth-century women interpreters and composers of the tradition. Her continuing performance career — she remained active into the 2010s and 2020s — has made her one of the longest careers of any contemporary Kabyle artist.