New York, as a Workshop: Where Aneesa Sheikh Turned an Athlete Into an Artist

Ask Aneesa Sheikh to name a room in New York and she does not name a venue. "Not one specific outside venue, honestly," she says. "If anything, I'd name my own studio apartment. That's where I practiced constantly — basically Aneesa headquarters."

The apartment was near Madison Square Park, in the Flatiron district, and she is plain about it: "I loved it there." It is an unglamorous answer from a performer who has walked the red carpet at the Cannes Film Festival, and it is the accurate one. For her the city was not a stage. It was the place where the work got done before there was a stage to take it to.

New York is the middle of the three parts she uses to tell her own story — the athlete, the artist, the icon. She graduated summa cum laude from the Tisch School of the Arts at New York University in 2025, and what she studied there was deliberately wide. Her coursework mixed performance, music production, vocal, acting and dance classes with outside courses in business, marketing, psychology and the music industry seen from the business side. It reads as a training for running the whole operation, not only for standing at the front of it.

What makes that arrival unusual is what it followed. Her schooling had been arranged around a rink. She skated before school most mornings, left classes early for training, completed a large part of high school online so that the schedule would hold, and spent two days a week largely inside a car between Kentucky and Michigan. A university campus was the first environment in years that was not organised around ice time.

The ice did not disappear; it changed status. "I kept skating for fun at Chelsea Piers," she says, "just to keep it part of my life, though not competitively anymore." A discipline that had been the whole timetable became one fixed point among several.

The line she carried out of those years is one she still repeats: "When words fail, music speaks." It reads as a motto. It is also a fairly exact description of a change of medium by somebody who had spent a decade communicating without words at all — to Beethoven, to Santana, in programmes choreographed for a panel. Music reached her first as something to move to. New York is where it became something to write.

The stages were there too. The one she singles out is the Masala Mixtape, a show with a lineup of well-known South Asian artists. "I really appreciated having a slot to sing there," she says.

In her catalogue the city turns up as a workroom rather than a campus. "Iconic", the most recent of her eighteen released tracks, was begun in London, continued in Brooklyn, taken further in Michigan and finished in Mumbai. Brooklyn is one stop on a four-city itinerary, and the working title — "Brooklyn to Bombay" — named two of them before the song was renamed.

Not one of those eighteen tracks came out on a label, and that is a decision rather than an accident. "I've had label conversations globally, not just in New York, but in Paris, Dubai, and India too," she says. She turned them down because the terms were not right for her. "As an independent artist, I believe in owning your music and your intellectual property," she says, and many of the contracts she was offered were decades-long agreements that would have signed those rights away almost entirely. She does not rule a label out. "I do think a label can earn a proportionate stake if they bring real value to an artist's career."

It is equally worth being clear about what the city did not supply. The work that changed how she sounds is not a New York story: Hindi and diction, worked through with the dialect coach Kulvinder Bakshish; movement, with the choreographer Paresh Shirodkar; and a daily practice she keeps wherever she happens to be. She grew up speaking only English, and established artists in India and Bollywood told her she would not be able to sing in Hindi and should stick to American English and modelling. The answer to that came out of Mumbai-facing work, not out of a campus.

One thread does run straight from Tisch to the present. She still takes American English acting coaching twice a week, on Wednesdays and Saturdays — coaching in her own first language, which is only worth paying for if the target is screen work. Asked what would make the next five years count, she names three things: a starring film role with one of her own songs inside it, a global performing schedule, and collaborations with artists from other cultures and backgrounds. The acting coaching is that answer with a budget attached.

A workshop is where a thing is made before anybody sees it. That is what the city was to her: a degree that taught her every side of the business, a rink kept for pleasure, one studio apartment, and eighteen records released on her own terms.