I am a multidisciplinary artist working across performance, movement, music and community. My practice is rooted in questions of identity, belonging, and what it means to be at home in oneself and in the world — questions I came to not as abstractions, but through lived experience.
I came to the UK at eleven, remember English sounding like gobbledygook, and received my British passport at 21 years. I am, in every sense, a first-generation immigrant, and that experience of navigating worlds, languages, and belonging has never left me — it lives in how I see, how I make, and how I move in the world. The ethnic diversity I carry is something I hold with pride. It reflects not just personal heritage but the layered histories of West Asia — ‘the Middle East’ — of diaspora, displacement, and the resilience of people who have always had to hold multiple identities at once.
My neurodiversity is something I am only beginning to name and understand, and whose influence on my thinking, perception, and creative process I am still discovering. My work sits at the intersection of all of this: memory, identity, belonging, and the ongoing, nonlinear work of integrating the self.
A thread that runs quietly through my practice is an exploration of Sufi philosophy and movement. Sufi thought — with its emphasis on the inward, the questioning, and the fluid — has offered me a spiritual home that doesn’t demand conformity, and feels inseparable from the political: a belief that art can open spaces that argument alone cannot, inviting presence and reflection where dialogue has been crowded out.
I move between the deeply personal and the collectively shared, trusting that when we zoom far enough into an intimate truth, we often find something that resonates universally. For a long time, my creative practice lived quietly alongside the rest of my life — held privately, slowly deepening. Sharing it now feels like a deliberate act, rooted in a genuine desire to open dialogue, create space for reflection, and — through writing, performing and workshop facilitation — invite others into that same process of exploration.
Sheelan مشوار 