Our Offerings
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 people with practical tools for academic writing and studio practice.
Curatorial Practice
Participation centered live art and performance curation for exhibitions and programs.
Civic Performance Lab
Research led, participation centered programming for exhibitions and performances that can be activated in public space. We co-create live works that invite dialogue and transform how language and movement shape belonging.
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 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
Meet THE FOUNDER
Zoya Sardashti | Performer & Socially Engaged Artist
Zoya Sardashti is a transdisciplinary performing artist and conflict transformation specialist whose life and work are shaped by early experiences of cultural displacement in the southern United States. Born in Denver, Colorado to an Iranian father and Anglo American mother, Zoya grew up in environments where belonging was rarely given 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 they were a 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, our personal histories become a source of insight, resilience, and collective growth.
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, 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