Zoya Shojaee Sardashti

Zoya Shojaee Sardashti (they/them) is a transdisciplinary artist, educator, and PhD candidate in Meaningful Artistic Research (University of Humanistic Studies and HKU University of the Arts Utrecht). Their doctoral research examines nonviolence as an embodied, performative approach to translation, asking how voice, movement, and multilingual practice can expand what becomes communicable across difference and conflict.

Working through Practice-as-Research and autoethnography, they develop participatory performances, workshops, and sound-based works as research outputs. These processes generate analysable artefacts such as performance scores, scripts, audio works, visual mappings, and multimodal documentation, often created in collaboration with participants.

Their work focuses on cultural translation, care ethics, decolonial critique, and conflict transformation in museum, educational, and community contexts. Alongside their PhD, they lead Home Soil Projects, a platform for performance-based research, public pedagogy, and co-created interventions.