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 collaborative programs that invite participants to translate lived experience and critical theory into creative practice.
Working with writing, voice, movement, and dialogue, each project uses performance research to examine what emerges between self-reflection and collective inquiry. These embodied processes support social justice practices across artistic, academic, and everyday contexts.
Zoya Shojaee Sardashti, Founder & Performing Artist-Researcher
Civic Performance Lab
The Civic Performance Lab brings artists, institutions, and communities together to investigate civic questions through performance. Each collaboration develops through embodied inquiry, facilitated group processes, and a public format shaped in relation to its site and participants.
Practice-as-Research Sessions
These sessions connect critical theory with embodied practice. Participants work with writing, movement, voice, and dialogue to develop material from lived experience while gaining practical tools for artistic research, academic writing, and studio practice.
The Body as an Archive and a Site of Homecoming
“The body is one’s home” describes the body as a living archive that holds personal and collective experiences shaped by social and cultural structures. Home Soil Projects creates performance-based frameworks through which participants can examine, document, and share embodied knowledge within consensual and relational contexts.
Through writing, voice, movement, and dialogue, participants translate self-reflection into collective inquiry. The process can lead to performances, exhibitions, participant-authored records, and academic writing while creating space for belonging to emerge through shared attention rather than fixed definitions of identity and citizenship.
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
My life and work are shaped by early experiences of cultural displacement in the southern United States. Born to an Iranian father and an Anglo American mother, I grew up navigating environments in which belonging was conditional and personal history was treated as something requiring explanation. These experiences led me to performance as a way of examining how bodies carry political histories and negotiate belonging.
My practice is grounded in the belief that, when shared within consensual, relational, and ethically grounded contexts, personal histories can become sources of insight, courage, and collective growth.
A Global Impact
Over the past 16 years, I have developed more than 30 projects with universities, cultural institutions, and peacebuilding organizations internationally. Through intercultural dialogue and embodied research, these collaborations invite participants to examine how ethnicity, gender, sexuality, religion, citizenship, and ability shape belonging.
Across different communities and geographies, I create formats in which performance, socially engaged art, education, and community engagement intersect. The work rehearses more equitable and attentive ways of being together.
Public talk, Silent Green, Vorspiel / transmediale and CTM, Berlin, 2022.