Born in Tehran, she started painting and calligraphy in the early 1990s and then trained in graphic design in Al Zahra University, she later moved to Paris, where she studied at the Sorbonne, earning a Master of Fine Arts. Today Arabi has a studio in Dubai.

Arabi’s paintings are resolutely abstract, but nonetheless animated. For her, they are a form of spontaneous personal expression, an inward journey, a record of her feelings and emotions. Her artwork is a response to her surrounding, to her past and present memory. Her works is her vision rather than painted depiction of stories or messages. Arabi also takes photographs with similar abstract qualities.