Life & Work with Shereen Khan
Today we’d like to introduce you to Shereen Khan.
Hi Shereen, please kick things off for us with an introduction to yourself and your story.
Raised on a delicious regiment of I Love Lucy and MGM musicals, I knew I wanted to be an actor from a young age. I studied theatre at LACHSA and established a strong foundation for being this vessel for storytelling…and then I launched into adulthood and did everything else but acting.
I ran a martial arts studio, taxied aircraft off runways, bartended, played music, edited sound, was a studio executive, was an in-theatre technician…the list goes on.
And there are reasons for these detours that I’ll one day do a TED talk or podcast about, but while on the 10 year trajectory of a perfectly respectable, if exhausting, executive career path at a major studio, I was gifted a moment to stop and reassess when the company made my position redundant and laid me off.
At the time, I was learning from a wellness coach this concept of Primary vs. Secondary Nutrition. Primary Nutrition is not food you eat but things that feed your mind, spirit, relationships, vocation, etc. If one of these “nutrients” is off balance or depleted, it’s fundamentally unhealthy. I remembered when I was studying theatre at school, how the hours disappeared without needing a break because the work itself was fueling me. I realized, “I’m an artist and I’m starving creatively.” or, to coin a trope, ”I’m not a starving artist, I’m starving the artist in me.” It had become bad for my health to continue to do anything else. No benefits package could compare to the life-saving, spirit-enriching action of simply committing my soul to the thing I know I’m here on earth to do. So, instead of submitting resumes executive work elsewhere, I pivoted all my ambition toward a creative life.
