Zoya Sardashti is the creative director of Home Soil. During the last seven years, she created a body of work entitled "Waking Up Iranian American," in Seoul, London, Los Angeles, Glurns, Venice, Florence, Bozen, Milan, and San Diego. This life project is a series of auto-ethnographic works and performative interventions focused on the ways cultural exchange develops between a performer and a participant. The intention is to create a space where people are invited to participate in discussions and actions about being between cultures, nationalism, and Islamophobia so that we might move beyond antiquated notions of free and oppressed. In this sense, the dialogical framework of the performances is a form of collaboration and, in its broadest sense, a key to changing power relationships between performers and participants. In "Waking Up Iranian American," social intimacy is used as a strategy to counteract the positioning cultures of fear intend to create. Zoya is currently working towards a master's degree in conflict resolution and management at the University of San Diego, USA and pursuing a Ph.D. in philosophy, art, and social thought at the European Graduate School, Switzerland, under the supervision of Professor Judith Butler.