Farah Yasmeen Shaikh

SVCreates 2018 SVLaureate — On Stage

The SVLaureate program recognizes our region’s finest artists through a competitive process, using independent expert panels, and honor these artists with unrestricted cash prizes, promotion, and recognition with an award at the annual SVArts Awards. Farah Yasmeen Shaikh was awarded the 2018 On Stage artist award.

The daughter of Pakistani immigrants, Farah Yasmeen Shaikh grew up in Salinas. Encouraged by her parents to pursue her artistic side, she began dancing at age 5, but she didn’t begin learning Kathak — the classical Indian dance that she has turned into her career — until her first year of college at San Francisco State. That college class was taught by Pandit Chitresh Das, an internationally renowned master of the craft who soon became Shaikh’s mentor. Since then, she has built a 20-year career as both a performer and instructor. In her ambitious dance drama The Forgotten Empress, she brought an entire team of musicians to Pakistan to perform; her newest work is The Parting, a collaboration with EnActe Arts, which uses dance, theater, and multimedia to tell personal stories of the displacement caused by the 1947 partitioning of…