How We Work: Performance Research for Social Justice
Our Services: Integrating Theory and Practice
Artistic Education Courses
We offer experiential graduate-level courses in autoethnographic training and practice-as-research methodologies, equipping participants with the tools to understand and apply theory through performance-based activities.
Consulting
Through our adaptive methodology, participants learn to reshape dominant language and movement patterns that reinforce exclusionary practices and perpetuate injustices.
Project Curation Programming
Our curation process guides participants in integrating embodied practice and research into academic, artistic, and socially engaged projects so they continue to develop adaptable strategies for long-term impact in their communities and professional work.
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
THE BODY IS ONE’S HOME
Sharing Narratives That Shift Perspectives
We use the concept "the body is one’s home" as a living archive where experiences are stored. Many of these experiences remain unexamined due to dominant social and cultural structures. Through our adaptive practice-as-research methodology, participants engage with these embodied experiences by accessing, documenting, and sharing narratives of self-knowledge.
In a world where social inequities are normalized, Home Soil Projects activates performance-based activities and research methods to invite participants to analyze tensions within the body and adapt to shifting social and cultural landscapes. This process deepens self-awareness in relation to others' experiences. Through collective understanding, groups generate context-specific responses to today’s social challenges. As a result, these insights translate into localized approaches to projects such as making performances, designing interventions, and writing academic articles.
Through our work, we create inclusive spaces where rigid definitions of identity and citizenship do not determine belonging. Instead, we encourage participants to imagine and create realities of being together that cannot be easily manipulated by exclusionary ideologies.
By navigating social challenges with empathy and adaptability, we strengthen our interconnections with each other and with the environments we inhabit.
Waking Up Iranian American, four one-to-one performances 2012—ongoing
Meet THE FOUNDER
Zoya Sardashti | Performance Practitioner & Socially Engaged Artist
Born in Denver, Colorado, to an Iranian father and Anglo-American mother, Zoya’s experiences of cultural displacement in the southern United States drew awareness to the necessity of creating spaces where people belong and recognize themselves as part of a community.
These experiences shaped a lifelong commitment to creating socially engaged performance projects—ones that challenge and disrupt oppressive systems reinforcing racism, ableism, transphobia, homophobia, and patriarchal structures. Whether on stage or off, in nature or on the street, inside universities or within communities, Zoya’s practice remains deeply rooted in relationships and interdependent ways of expressing, moving, and thinking.
A Global Impact
With a portfolio of 30+ projects spanning 18 years, Zoya has collaborated with academic institutions, arts organizations, and peacebuilding initiatives, working with participants based in 15 countries. As a performance researcher, socially engaged artist, and cultural mediator, Zoya initiates cross-cultural dialogue that shifts perceived divisions of ethnicity, gender, sexuality, religion, citizenship, and ability.
Through Home Soil Projects, Zoya co-creates spaces where art, research, and peacebuilding intersect to develop embodied practices for exploring socially just ways of being together.
Public Talk at Silent Green Vorspiel/Transmediale-CTM Berlin 2022