Aahoo Jahansouz "Sarah" Shahi (Persian: آهو جهانسوز سارا شاهی; born January 10, 1980) is an American television actress and former NFL Cheerleader of Iranian and Spanish ancestry. She played Carmen on The L Word in 2008, Kate Reed in the USA Network legal drama Fairly Legal in 2011–12, and also starred as Sameen Shaw on the CBS crime drama Person of Interest. She has also appeared as the main female role Det. Dani Reese in Life, and in a supporting role in Alias. In 2018, she starred in the series Reverie. In 2019, she appeared in a few episodes of City on a Hill on Showtime.
Sarah Shahi was born on January 10, 1980, in Euless, Texas, and raised there. She is the daughter of Abbas Jahansouz Shahi and Mah Monir Soroush Azar, an interior designer, who divorced when she was ten. Her father is from Iran. Her father's family left Iran two years before the Iranian Revolution. Her father, who was working at the American Embassy in Iran, was slated for execution when the last Shah's regime collapsed in 1979, but was able to flee the country. Her mother was born in Spain, to an Iranian father and a Spanish mother. She has an older brother, Cyrus, and a younger sister, Samantha, who is a production assistant. Her birth name, Aahoo (Persian: آهو), means "gazelle" in Persian. She is a descendant of Fath-Ali Shah Qajar of the Qajar Dynasty.