When she isn’t forcing her sister watch trauma-inducing movies, dreaming of her debut screenplay, or low-key preparing to be a superhero, Shahadi spends her free time roaming around her home city. She’s a fourth generation New Yorker on her mother’s side, and proud of it. She shops at the Barclay’s Target down the street, and she grew up, career-wise, a few stops north on the Q train on Broadway. Her grandmother on her father’s side, Sylvia Joseph, who immigrated from Trinidad, is her biggest non-Hollywood role model ,and lives only a five minute walk from her. (“My grandma has made such a big impact on my life with food, and the way she talks and how real she is and the strength that she had to drop everything and come to America to give my dad a better life. It makes me feel really amazing, because she is passing down her strength to my dad and to me, and I can pass that down. It’s an honour just to be related to her.”) She once started a side hustle while in School of Rock, selling her homemade knit hats and scarves throughout the theatre. Although she’s bicoastal, Shahadi says she’d never be a Hollywood girl. She’s a true New Yorker, from her thick accent to her unwaveringly strong spirit. After all, her name literally means “most brilliant protector of our people.”