The Art of the Dual Career: How Sharon Shobana Vasudevan Built a Company Without Abandoning the Stage

Most people, at some point in their careers, are told to pick a lane. Sharon Shobana Vasudevan never did. Born in Singapore in 1994, she spent the better part of a decade quietly accumulating expertise in both the corporate and creative worlds before concluding that the choice itself was a false one. Today, as the Founder and CEO of Shooting Star Productions and a working singer, songwriter, actress, and composer, she is proof that the two lanes can be the same road.

Her story is not the kind that generates easy headlines. There was no single audition that changed everything, no viral moment that propelled her to overnight fame. Instead, there were years of grinding parallel careers — full-time corporate work by day, performing and producing by night and on weekends — until she had built something sturdy enough to stand on its own.

Foundations: choosing business to protect the art

When Sharon completed her schooling, she made a choice that might have surprised those who knew her as a performer. Rather than immediately pursuing a career in entertainment, she enrolled in a Business and Management degree with a specialisation in marketing. The decision was strategic, not a detour.

She recognised, perhaps earlier than most young artists do, that creative ambition without commercial understanding is a fragile thing. A degree in marketing gave her a framework for thinking about audiences, brand identity, and the mechanics of reaching people at scale. Business management taught her how organisations are built and sustained. These were tools, she understood, that the entertainment industry too often withholds from its most talented people.

That education also gave her credibility in rooms that might otherwise have been closed to her. When she later walked into multinational corporations as a marketing and event management professional, she carried not just artistic instincts but demonstrable analytical skills — a combination that would define her career.

A decade of discipline

For several years after graduation, Sharon worked full-time in event management and marketing at multinational companies. These roles exposed her to demanding professional standards, large-scale project management, and the expectation of measurable results. They were, in the language of entrepreneurship, a masterclass in execution.

At the same time, she maintained an active life as a performer. She had been winning singing competitions since her teenage years — six interschool competitions by the time she left school — and continued to take on freelance acting and singing work throughout her corporate career. At 17, she had already joined Vasantham Mediacorp as an actor, and in 2017 she reached a national audience as the second runner-up in Vasantham Star, one of Singapore's flagship Tamil singing contests.

"Building credibility, managing uncertainty, and sustaining growth required resilience and consistency."

The year after Vasantham Star, she produced her first independent track in collaboration with Malaysian rapper Psychomantra — a deliberate step toward creative autonomy. The song marked a shift from performer to producer, from interpreting other people's work to shaping her own artistic voice.

The entrepreneurial leap

At a certain point, Sharon had accumulated something rare: deep creative credibility combined with hard-earned corporate execution skills. The question was no longer whether she could build a company, but when. The founding of Shooting Star Productions was her answer.

The company operates across productions, corporate events, and creative media. As CEO, Sharon has applied the same standards she encountered in multinational environments — precision, accountability, client focus — to a context that also demands artistic vision. It is, by her own account, a synthesis she has been building toward for years.

Her role as a Regional Event Manager extends this further, placing her at the intersection of large-scale logistics and live performance. Projects under her leadership have earned her a reputation for what colleagues describe as empathetic professionalism: the ability to understand not just what a client wants, but what an audience needs.

The artist has not left the building

What is perhaps most striking about Sharon's current chapter is that entrepreneurship has not displaced her artistic life. She continues to write, compose, and perform. Her YouTube channel documents an ongoing creative practice — performances that carry the emotional directness of someone who has been doing this not for acclaim but because the alternative is unthinkable.

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Through Shooting Star Productions, she has also made the development of other artists a formal part of her work. The company offers emerging talent the kind of guidance and platform she once had to seek out for herself — a deliberate closing of a circle that began on small stages in Singapore more than a decade ago.

What Sharon Shobana represents

In a creative economy that often forces a binary choice between artistic integrity and commercial viability, Sharon Shobana Vasudevan has carved out a third path. Her career is the argument, made in practice, that the skills required to run a successful business and the sensibility required to make meaningful art are not opposites. They are, handled correctly, mutually reinforcing.

She is 32 years old. She runs a company. She still performs. She is building something designed to outlast both. In Singapore's creative landscape — and increasingly beyond it — that combination is worth paying attention to.