Mira Shihada is full of passion. Her big green eyes radiate vitality, and from the eloquent and humorous tone in her voice alone, I can tell she has spunk. With a childlike quality and an unquenchable desire to find art in everything that she does, Shihada has made a name for herself as an artist, painting murals at El-Gouna Church and the popular Cairo eatery La Bodega.

Millions across the Arab world and beyond, though, will recognize her art from the hit 2004 film Baheb El-Cima (I Love Cinema), for which she did all the artwork.

Despite the rapid success she’s had since beginning her work in Egypt, Shihada has decided to quit commercial art. Instead, she now plans to spend her time teaching yoga and sculpting, something she has been passionate about since a post-college sojourn in New York, where she studied carving at New York University. In New York, she also worked as a photo-researcher and spent time working in various forms of design, from illustration to magazine-cover design to projects with the Myriad Film Festivals.

Shihada never studied art; she studied psychology at the American University in Cairo and has a master’s degree in the same subject from Britain’s University of Sussex. Her work in Cairo began when she came to assist her sister — who works in furniture design, murals and trompe l’oiel — on design and interior decoration projects.

“I started working with my sister, but Janan isn’t actually a fine artist, she works in furniture and mural design. Basically when I came back from New York, I came to help her out. She trusted my taste,” says Shihada. “I learned about paint as a material, I was always into drawing and sketching and into anatomy. She helped me know what materials are available. I got into it through her, but she has a whole team working under her, I don’t. But so far I have taken jobs that I liked.”

Whimsical waiters fly off the pillars inside La Bodega. The sketches on the walls create an atmosphere that is at once comfortable, sophisticated and stylish. The style is dreamlike and the drawings are full of movement that is Shihada’s defining quality. With a growing demand for art in restaurants, offices and even homes, Cairo is seeing a surge in the number of commercial artists breaking into this relatively new field of design.

Shihada began drawing as a child growing up in Saudi Arabia. She recounts how she would go to the school library and check out books on gymnastics. Her fascination with acrobatics led to the drawings of the movement and muscles. More recently, yoga has done the same for her.

“As a kid the only books I would borrow were about gymnastics,” recalls Shihada, whose interest was sparked by seeing the amazing things her gymnast classmates could do. “I always loved the movements — standing, stilting, the 1980s photography — I loved that. And for me, stock motion was everything. I think that’s how the art came around. I knew how to draw people in motion. It was always about motion for me.”

Shihada says her work at La Bodega and in Baheb El-Cima holds a special place in her heart. La Bodega was her what she calls her “first whimsical work.”

She also recalls her work for the film fondly. “With Baheb El-Cima I produced the paintings that Leila Elwy supposedly painted. I loved it and it was a lot of fun. I had to do a lot of nude women and had to read the script and create according to that — which painting appears in a certain part of the script,” she says. “For example, one of them had to be for when the artist was depressed.”

As a commercial artist, Shihada quickly tired of being hired to work on a specific painting, drawing or mural. She did it to pay the bills, she admits, capitalizing upon a skill that was very much in demand. “As a commercial artist, I needed to pay my bills. I always wanted to think of doing an exhibition but I needed to work, to make money. I was also doing art direction, working in commercial advertising.”

“I rented my own studio, but I still have not been able to do my own stuff,” she says. “There has always been a client looking over my shoulder. There are jobs that have been complete hell, but sometimes when you have too many opinions out there, you lose a sense of your own instincts. The paying client has more right than you — it’s not like I started something and then they bought it. I find it increasingly difficult to work under that kind of pressure.”

Now a yoga instructor, Shihada adopts a creative approach to her teachings, although she is taking a break to go to India for a few months. She is planning on resuming her teaching in September in addition to working on sculptures.

“I teach Ashtanga Yoga. [I have] always been fascinated by how people balance on one arm — the spiritual part sneaks in and you see how this is changing you,” notes Shihada.

It also helps her in further understanding how the body works. “The human body [has] always fascinated me. Now as a teacher I am learning a lot about anatomy, so I’m in heaven. I should have been a doctor. Anatomy, muscles, the skeletal structure and how different people are — that is very creative as well, trying to teach people [the different elements of] yoga.”

Sculpture is the next step in Shihada’s career as an artist, and she has ambitions of having her own show and working with an art form that has always fascinated her. “I want to start chopping away and doing something with more texture,” she says with a wry smile. “I took a sculpture course. I always wanted to work with stone.”

“The idea of not knowing what is going to come up [from the stone, and the colors and depth of it], and how accidents happen, and then you realize it is actually meant to be,” she says. “I did it as a part-time thing, the teacher didn’t want me to do anything figurative but it turned out to be figure, figure, figure.”

Shihada insists that her degrees in psychology have helped more with yoga than with art, but it is obvious that within the yoga instructor is an artist with a lot to say and even more to offer.

“I’m more of a psychologist, it helps with teaching yoga. I don’t know much about art history or other artists and analyzing abstract art. I am a drawer, I draw,” she says simply. “I am also interested in yoga, healing, psychology, pain, misery — you know, what people go through. As a yoga teacher, it is okay to tell someone to relax their shoulders and talk for an hour about their mother.” et