Aida Shirazi began learning music as a child, particularly classical Iranian music and the sanṭūr, a form of struck string sitar. She earned a master’s in composition and music theory from Bilkent University in Ankara. In 2016, she started her thesis in composition and music theory at the University of California, Davis. In 2021, she joined IRCAM’s Cursus Program in composition and computer music.

Her pieces have been played by the Orchestre Philharmonique de Radio France, International Contemporary Ensemble, Quince Ensemble, Ensemble Dal Niente, Left Coast Chamber Ensemble, Empyrean Ensemble, and Bilkent Symphony Orchestra, at events including ManiFeste Festival, Wien Modern, Huddersfield Contemporary Music Festival, Mostly Mozart, OutHear New Music Week, MATA, Marlboro Music Festival, Direct Current, Taproot, and Tehran Contemporary Sounds.

Shirazi focuses on timbre to structure her works and finds inspiration in Iranian and British language and literature. Poetry plays a central role in her work. Her compositions mix spoken word with acoustic and electronic sounds. Portrait and What The Wind Will Do When You Aren’t Looking for a Thousand Years (2019) are based on poems by Meredith Herndon, while Né entre corps (Born between Bodies, 2022), her final piece for Cursus, is based on a French poem by Irène Gayraud and a Persian poem by Haleh Ghassemi. Miniature (2020) was inspired from a quatrain by eleventh-century Persian poet and polymath Omar Khayyam, while of distempered corpses and distilled winds, a work in progress, draws on Walt Whitman’s This Compost. Shirazi sees the presence of poetry in her work as an anchor to her childhood in Iran, where poetry is integral to the shared cultural heritage and impresses itself into everyday language. The use of the sanṭūr is also key in this aspect of her work, since this instrument is traditionally used to play short pieces, in free time, accompanied by sung verses of classical Persian poetry.

Shirazi is a founding member and artistic codirector of the Iranian Female Composers Association (IFCA), created in 2017 to bring together female Iranian composers from around the world.