The body is one’s home, and the relationships we cultivate create common ground between us.
Through Home Soil Projects, I develop workshops, performances, and programs that invite participants to translate lived experience and critical theory into creative practice.
Grounded in embodied approaches to writing, vocalizing, movement, and dialogue, each project uses performance research to deepen understandings of what emerges during transitions between self-reflection and collaboration.
These explorations generate insights into how embodied processes activate social justice practices across artistic, academic, and everyday life contexts.
Zoya Shojaee Sardashti, Performing Artist-Researcher & Founder
Artistic Education Workshops
These workshops bridge critical theory and embodied practice. Participants work with writing, movement, and voice to connect ideas to lived experience and creative process. This approach equips participants with practical tools for academic writing and studio practice.
Curatorial Practice
Participation-centered live art and performance curation for theaters, exhibitions, and public programs.
Civic Performance Lab
Research-led, participation-centered programming for performances and exhibitions that explore alternative assemblies across public and virtual space. We co-create live works that invite intercultural dialogue, transforming ways language and movement shape belonging.
A framework for understanding the body as an archive of experience, a space of dialogue, and a site of homecoming.
We use the concept “the body is one’s home” to describe the body as a living archive, one that holds personal and collective experiences shaped by social and cultural structures. Many of these experiences remain unexamined due to systemic violence and internalized hierarchies.
Through our adaptive methodology, participants access, document, and share narratives of self-knowledge. This embodied process fosters critical reflection, translating personal awareness into relational insight.
In a world where inequity is often normalized, Home Soil Projects activates performance-based practices to help participants examine tensions within the body and respond to shifting cultural landscapes. The work leads to context-specific outcomes such as performances, exhibitions, and academic writing grounded in lived experience.
Rather than uphold rigid definitions of identity and citizenship, we create inclusive spaces where belonging emerges through co-created understanding. By cultivating empathy, adaptability, and deep attention to relational dynamics, our work strengthens interconnection between people, communities, and the environments we inhabit.
Reclaiming Maternal Lineage: The “Parricida” Performance as an Act of Care and Resistance – Care Ethics, Aesthetics, & Repair, 3rd Care Ethics Conference, Soesterberg, Netherlands | 2025 Photo by Thomas de Wit
Zoya Shojaee Sardashti | Performing Artist-Researcher
Zoya’s life and work are shaped by early experiences of cultural displacement in the southern United States. Born to an Iranian father and Anglo American mother, Zoya grew up in environments where belonging was conditional and often had to be claimed. From a young age, they were asked, often demanded, to explain their origin or the meaning of their name. When answering honestly, their body was viewed as a site of conflict rather than simply human. The pressure to narrate multilayered, often traumatic histories, and to provide context as if acting like political analyst, revealed the emotional toll of being positioned as a cultural translator. These encounters laid the foundation for using performance as a means of social repair.
Above all, their practice is anchored in the understanding that when shared within consensual, relational, and ethically grounded contexts, our personal histories become a source of insight, courage, and collective growth.
A Global Impact
With over 30 projects globally, Zoya has collaborated with universities, arts, peacebuilding organizations over the past 16 years. Through intercultural dialogue, each project invites participants to reframe boundaries of ethnicity, gender, sexuality, religion, citizenship, and ability.
Across diverse communities and geographies, Zoya co-creates platforms through Home Soil Projects where performance, socially engaged art, education, and community engagement intersect. This work cultivates practices that explore socially just ways of being together.
Public Talk at Silent Green Vorspiel/Transmediale-CTM Berlin 2022