Dubai-Born Musician Abiraahmi Shankar Lives Between Science & Song

The 26-year-old Dubai-raised researcher and musician is reimagining what it means to make knowledge and art accessible, blending psychology, culture, and song into a practice rooted in empowerment.

Dubai-born creative Abiraahmi Shankar exists somewhere between two frequencies. 

By day, she builds tools for mental health research at NYU’s ARCADIA Lab for Suicide Prevention—frameworks, codebooks, ways of understanding care. By night, she trades data for melody, layering guitar over soft distortion and verses that breathe in several languages. 

“Both spaces are driven by the same core values,” she tells SceneNowUAE. “Accessibility and empowerment.”


It sounds simple, but the through line is anything but. Her work is not about duality so much as dialogue; between evidence and emotion, between the measurable and the felt. “I don’t leave the lab humming a new chorus and I don’t pick up my guitar hoping for a dataset,” she laughs. “But the impulse to make something that helps someone else feel seen? That’s the same.”


Her childhood unfolded between two Dubais—the immigrant city she lived in, and the glossy mirage rising just a few kilometres away. “I think that contrast made me curious,” she says. “It made me wonder why access—to opportunity, to care, to creativity—can look so different depending on where you stand.”  

That curiosity sharpened during the construction of the Dubai Frame, a monumental structure meant to link ‘Old’ and ‘New’ Dubai. “It was supposed to symbolise progress,” she says quietly. “But for me, it also reflected inequity—who gets to be framed, and who gets left out.” And so, split between two cities, she learned early on that life often exists in contradictions. 

Shankar’s music carries those dualities; the percussive beat of languages overlapping, the hum of a place perpetually in translation. “Growing up, you hear everything—Hindi film songs, Arabic pop, Tamil ballads, American rock—all bleeding into each other,” she recalls. “That kind of layering teaches you something about belonging.”


Her days became split between research design and rehearsal, spreadsheets and sound checks. “My neighbors always knew when I was writing a paper versus a song,” she jokes. But beneath the humor is a sense of intention: a refusal to separate one practice from the other. “Music and research both ask you to listen carefully,” she says. “To notice what’s missing.”

The act of noticing is what ties her work together. In the lab, it means designing tools that make mental health research more inclusive. In her art, it means creating spaces for people who exist between borders, identities, languages—people like her.

Yet, it wasn’t until a recent Boston performance that she had her lightbulb moment. Mid-song, the sound cut out. Instead of silence, the crowd kept singing—strangers, riding different frequencies, yet still holding the melody together. “That shared instinct to continue? That’s when I realised that entirely different things could coexist. And that the overlap is the most interesting place to be.” 


Her most recent single, ‘Validation,’ was born from that moment. The track, written in English, Sinhala, and Tamil, became a family collaboration. Her parents helped refine translations, shaping a song that mirrored the way they spoke at home—language slipping between tongues, never choosing one. “The rhythm comes from that,” she says. “From the in-between. From it being ours, all of ours.”

Now, living between New York and Dubai, Shankar has learned to carry both cities within her. She doesn’t see herself choosing anytime soon. “Nowadays I just want to keep asking the right questions. And if the answer arrives as a song, or a study, or something in between—that’s enough.”