Giti Pashaei (Tehran , June 13 , 1948 - Tehran , May 7 , 1995) was an Iranian singer and musician. Her name, Giti means "world" in original Pahlavi language. She inherited her passion for music from her grandfather, Jafar Mansoori, who was known as a poet and musician. Her early life was spent attending the master-classes of such musicians as Faramarz Paywar, Mahdi Foroogh and Mahmoud Karimi. She continued her education in New York, where she obtained a diploma in architecture and also studied orchestration and harmony and became a composer. Giti was one of the most popular Iranian singers of the late 1960s and 1970s. She became famous with her song "gole maryam" (The Maria Flower). The Iranian Revolution put an end to her singing career in 1979. Women were forbidden to sing in public. Later on she composed many sound tracks for Iranian movies after the Iranian Revolution in 1979. As a composer, most of the time she worked with her husband Masoud Kimiai, a movie director, whom she married in 1969. In the late 1980s she moved to Hamburg in Germany where she researched Western Church and Baroque music. She died of cancer in Tehran on the 7th May 1995. Her songs and compositions are still heard abroad, particularly in Greece, Syria and Azerbaijan.