Our Services: Embodied Practice & Research
Artistic Education Courses
Designed to bridge critical theory and embodied practice, these courses invite participants into a dynamic process of writing, movement, and vocal exploration. Through autoethnographic methods and practice-as-research methodologies, participants critically engage their own positionality and cultural contexts through embodied, intercultural reflection.
This approach equips participants with tools to understand and apply theory in both academic writing and creative practice, grounding critical inquiry in lived experience.
Consulting
Offering a responsive and relational approach, our consulting supports individuals and teams in identifying and transforming dominant language and movement patterns that sustain exclusionary practices.
Adaptive, embodied methods cultivate awareness and provide practical tools for improving communication, collaboration, and organizational culture in ways that support equity and care.
Curated Projects & Programming
This core service invites participants to co-create projects that integrate embodied practice and research. Each curated pathway evolves with the needs of the participants, building adaptable strategies for lasting impact in arts and peacebuilding contexts.
Zoya Sardashti, Founder & Artistic Director
Zoya is exceptionally good in listening - and in re-phrasing what had been said, which helps one's own voicing of thoughts. The teaching is very engaging, encouraging participation through gentleness. It includes creative approaches and manages to shift beyond one's comfort zone without feeling uncomfortable at any moment.
I really don't know how to put it in words but I just loved your teaching and your presence.
-Hee Yeong, PhD Philosophy
THE BODY IS ONE’S HOME
Sharing Narratives That Shift Perspectives
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 practice-as-research 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, interventions, 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
Meet THE FOUNDER
Zoya Sardashti | Performer & Socially Engaged Artist
Born in Denver, Colorado, to an Iranian father and Anglo-American mother, Zoya’s early experiences of gender inequality and cultural displacement in the southern United States revealed the urgent necessity of creating spaces where people belong and can recognize themselves as part of a community.
These formative encoutners shaped a lifelong commitment to creating socially engaged performance projects that challenge and disrupt systems reinforcing racism, gender inequality, ableism, transphobia, homophobia, and femme phobia. Whether on stage or off, in nature or on the street, inside universities or beyond, Zoya’s practice remains deeply rooted in relationships and interdependent ways of expressing, moving, and thinking.
A Global Impact
With over 30 projects globally, Zoya has collaborated with universities, arts organizations, and peacebuilding institutions over the past 16 years. In each project, they initiate cross-cultural dialogue that shifts perceived boundaries around ethnicity, gender, sexuality, religion, citizenship, and ability.
Across diverse communities and geographies, Zoya co-creates platforms through Home Soil Projects where performance research, community engagement, and peacebuilding intersect. This work cultivates practices that explore socially just ways of being together.
Public Talk at Silent Green Vorspiel/Transmediale-CTM Berlin 2022