Shama Sarwat Rahman () is a British singer-songwriter, sitarist, storyteller, performance artist, filmmaker and actor. Early life Rahman was born in Al Ain, United Arab Emirates to Bangladeshi parents, a medical doctor and classical singer. She has lived on three different continents and trained under the tutelage lineage of Pt Ravi Shankar of the Maihar gharana. Education Rahman studied Molecular biology at University College London. She completed a PhD in joint partnership at Imperial College London, Goldsmiths and the Royal College of Music in the cross-disciplinary field of Complexity Science complexity mathematical tools taken from statistical and chaos theory physics. to study the Neuroscientific Systems of Musical Creativity. This PhD spans musicology, psychology, philosophy, and the physics of emergent behaviour illustrating how the whole system works together. Music career Rahman's original band members have included Peter Edwards (piano or clarinet) who also recorded on the album Fable:Time, Domenico Angarano (bass or kaos pad), William Pearce Smith (violin), Christopher Lane (guitar) and Felix Higginbottom (percussion or drumkit), Nicolas Rouger (saxophone), Andres Castellanos (bass) and Oberon King (percussion or drumkit). She writes and arranges all music and lyrics from her poems. Rahman and her band weaves sitar, urban folk, stories and song together. Together with her band she mingles storytelling, metaphysics and poetry into their music and creates multi-layered harmonies and energy-driven lyrical rhythms with international influences evoking genres from punk to folk, classical to jazz, swing to bossa nova, spoken word to dubstep and drum and bass to create their own unique urban jazz folk genre. Rahman has performed as a solo artist and with her band and various guest artists in Bangladesh, England, Ireland, France, Germany and Bangladesh. She has performed at the Royal Festival Hall, Southbank Centre, headlined the Modern Mela in 2011's Alchemy Festival, and the 2014 London Jazz Festival. Major festivals include The Secret Garden Party, SilFest, SpitalFields Festival, featured on Womad radio, Supersonix festival (supporting Seth Lakeman and Ska Cubano), Wilderness, One Love Festival, special commission for Eastern Electronic Festival, Un-Convention and Fête de la Musique. She played live in the studio at BBC London 94.9 on the Sunny and Shay Show. Her solo performances include India festival in Belfast, opening for Into the Woods musical at the Queen Elizabeth Hall, NYE at The Troubadour. She has been commissioned by MOJO for a re-interpretation of The Beatles song "Eleanor Rigby" using her own unique jazz-sitar style