“The academy is not paradise. But learning is a place where paradise can be created. The classroom, with all its limitations, remains a location of possibility. In that field of possibility we have the opportunity to labour for freedom, to demand of ourselves and our comrades, an openness of mind and heart that allows us to face reality even as we collectively imagine ways to move beyond boundaries, to transgress. This is education as the practice of freedom.” (bell hooks in Teaching to Transgress, 1994, p. 207)

TEACHING AWARDS & GRANTS

2017 - Stanford Arts Catalyst Teaching Grant

2015 - UC Berkeley Outstanding Graduate Student Instructor Award

UNIVERSITY TEACHING & COURSE DEVELOPMENT

Stanford University: Department of Theater and Performance Studies

2017 - Introduction to Dance Studies: Dancing Across Stages, Clubs, Screens, and Borders

2017 - Dance on the Move: Migration, Border Zones, and Citizenship

2016 - Representations of the Middle East in Dance, Performance, and Popular Culture

University of California, Berkeley: Department of Theater, Dance, and Performance Studies

Theory & Writing Courses:

2015 - ‘Billionaires, Bombers, and Belly Dancers’: Middle East in Performance and Popular Culture

2014 - Doin’ the Hootchy Kootchy: Representations of the Middle East in Dance

2014 - ‘Ain’t I a Woman?’: Women of Color Feminist Performance

2013 - Performance and Popular Culture Through a Transnational Feminist Lens

2012 - The Politics and Performance of Culture in ‘World Dance’

Dance Technique/Somatic Courses & Workshops

2015 - Experimenting with Embodied Histories: Social Memory as a Source for New Dance Techniques

2013 - Vinyasa Yoga, 5-week series

TEACHING ASSISTANT POSITIONS

University of California, Berkeley: Department of Theater, Dance, and Performance Studies

2011 - Reflections of Gender, Culture, and Ethnicity in American Dance

2010 - The Drama of American Cultures: Race, Gender, and Performance

University of California, Berkeley: Department of Gender and Women’s Studies

2010 - Film, Feminism, and the Avant-Garde

CURRICULUM DEVELOPMENT

2017 – 2018 Stanford University, Department of Theater and Performance Studies

Developed curriculum toward “Introduction to Dance Studies” required courses for the dance minor at the undergraduate level and for required courses in the doctoral program in Theater and Performance Studies

PROFESSIONAL PEDAGOGICAL TRAINING

2017 - Identity in the Classroom, Stanford University (by application and acceptance), a two quarter-long program focused on strategies for diversity and inclusion in classroom settings, sponsored by the Office of the Vice Provost for Teaching and Learning

2013 - Dance Pedagogy, University of California, Berkeley, semester-long seminar designed to introduce students to foundational principles necessary to teach practice-based courses that involve movement, dance, and/or physical activity

2013 - Yoga Tree, San Francisco, CA, 200-hour Vinyasa Yoga Teacher Training Certification

2011 - Teaching College Composition, University of California, Berkeley, semester-long seminar covering teaching philosophies, course designs, instructional methods, and assessment issues in relation to teaching composition in a pluralistic university setting

ACADEMIC ADVISING & MENTORING (SELECT)

2018 - Stanford University: Department of Theater and Performance Studies, advised undergraduate student in writing, revising, and submitting an essay entitled “Choreographing Justice: How Akram Khan’s Until the Lions Challenges Western Gender Ideals in Performance” for publication in Contexts: Stanford Undergraduate Journal in Anthropology, published spring 2018

2017 - Stanford University: Department of Theater and Performance Studies, directed a quarter-long Independent Study with a Stanford undergraduate student on a project entitled “Performativity of Volunteerhood and Refugeehood: Moving Bodies, Borders, and Refugee Identity”

2014 – 2016 - University of California, Berkeley: Department of Theater, Dance & Performance Studies, mentored four first-generation and non-traditional TDPS majors and minors in graduate school applications

2014 – 2015 - Mills College: Department of Dance, MFA Thesis Reader for Aisan Hoss, “Dance of Islam: A Personal Investigation”

2003 – 2009 - Seattle Education Access (SEA) Peer Student Mentor - SEA is a non-profit organization serving underprivileged young adults who have experienced homelessness and are pursuing college degrees

2003 – 2004 - South Seattle Community College Student Support Services Peer Student Mentor - Student Support Services is a TRIO program at South Seattle Community College serving low-income students, first-generation students, and students with disabilities

OTHER TEACHING EXPERIENCE (SELECT)

Iranian dance techniques – classical/concert, regional, social, and contemporary (ongoing classes, private lessons, and workshops) (2001 – current)

2009: YWCA Berkeley 8 week-series

2008 – 2009: Seattle Iranian American Alliance kid’s classes

2008 – 2009: University of Washington Experimental College

2007 – 2009: Ongoing classes at Open Flight Studio, Seattle, WA

2003 – 2004: South Seattle Community College Continuing Education

TEACHING PHILOSOPHY

I am an interdisciplinary scholar-practitioner with twenty-five years as a dance-maker and pedagogue, and eight years of teaching university courses focused on dance and performance studies, critical ethnic studies, and feminist studies. I view my classroom as a performative space for enacting social change and creating equitable worlds. In this space, I cultivate intellectual communities where each student’s experiences are critical source material for knowledge production. My courses help students see the relationships between performance, culture, and politics. Through active dialogue, community-engaged research, and creative practice, I prompt students to see the course materials as relevant to their lives so that they can reflect upon and hone their artistic and political praxis. I also provide opportunities for students to engage with artistic communities and practices different from their own as a way to cultivate social responsibility and global citizenship.

I have developed pedagogical methods to support these objectives during twenty years of teaching community-based Iranian dance technique classes and eight years of teaching university courses in performance theory, history, and practice. For six years, I taught courses of my own design in UC Berkeley’s Department of Theater, Dance, and Performance Studies and in Stanford’s Department of Theater and Performance Studies. I gained additional pedagogical experience through two years as a teacher’s assistant for UC Berkeley’s American Cultures courses on performance, race, and ethnicity. My dedication to teaching earned me UC Berkeley’s Outstanding Graduate Student Instructor Award, a Stanford Arts Catalyst Teaching Grant, and high student evaluations in all of my classes at UC Berkeley and Stanford.

In my dance and performance theory and history courses, I link critical inquiry with creative praxis to address the socio-political implications of performance on stages, screens, streets, and in everyday gestures. I begin each term by providing analytical tools for acting as critical consumers of a wide range of cultural productions. We draw from feminist performance methodologies, including theater scholar Jill Dolan’s work on the “resistant reader” and dance scholar Priya Srinivasan’s theorizations of the “unruly spectator.” I emphasize that the formal qualities of any given performance or art object do not exist separately from the cultural and political contexts that produce them. As I teach students to analyze the formal qualities of cultural products, I also prompt them to consider: Who is the ideal or assumed spectator? On what historical trajectory is the given cultural production situated? What are the conditions of production, circulation, and reception? How can art and performance intervene in power structures and help us imagine and create different worlds? Students apply these methods and questions to a variety of performance, discourse, and visual objects, such as YouTube videos, live performance, visual materials, and media discourse. Through creative prompts and movement-based workshops with me and invited guests, students further explore the implications of these questions through their own embodied practices.

I cultivate opportunities in my courses for experiential learning and community engagement. To facilitate this, I bring guest artists to my classes to give lectures and workshops, we collectively attend performances on campus and in the community, and I devise assignments that ask students to engage with sites and communities outside of the classroom. For instance, I taught feminist ethnographic methods in my Stanford course entitled Dance on the Move: Migration, Border Zones, and Citizenship, in which students conducted ethnographic projects with dance communities on the Stanford campus and in the Bay Area. Final projects included performance ethnographies where students employed dance and spoken word as praxis for interrogating the power relations of ethnographic encounters and, for some students, connecting course materials to their own community practices.

I craft collaborative learning opportunities for my students by involving them in my research, which focuses on immigrant Middle Eastern dancers and performance artists. For my Stanford course “Representations of the Middle East in Dance, Performance, and Popular Culture,” I assigned a performance curation assignment where students researched Middle Eastern performers (from dance, theater, and performance art), collected short videos of performances, and curated them by a connecting theme between them. The students composed curatorial statements and then presented their performance “exhibition” to the class and archived them on our course website platform. In another course I have developed in relation to my second book project, titled Impossible Muslims: Queer Archives of Arab and Iranian Performance Art, course content focuses on the work of US-based queer Arab and Iranian performance artists. I assign a digital humanities project where students are paired with performance artists from my book project to conduct dramaturgical research with them, and as the final assignment, the students collaboratively curate an online platform to publicly exhibit these artists’ performances on a WordPress website.

Along with my academic training, I bring extensive experience as a dance- and performance-maker, choreographer, dance instructor, artistic director, dramaturg, and certified yoga instructor. My practice-based pedagogy draws from the diverse techniques, methods, and performance worlds within which I have been immersed. Since 1997, I have performed in hundreds of performance events including street performance, guerilla political circuses, cultural events in immigrant communities, and full evening dance works on concert stages. In my dance technique and performance-making classes, I foster learning environments that develop students as both technicians and artist-scholars who understand their creative practice as critical forms of knowledge-making. While embodying and honoring form, we enhance our practices through examining the cultural, historical, and political contexts from which they come. Some of my courses preserve and transmit distinct dance forms; for instance, in my beginning to advanced level studio-based courses on dances from Iran, Tajikistan, and Afghanistan, I teach both the techniques and the histories of these forms. In other studio-based courses and assignments, I foster students’ creative inquiry and experimentation. For instance, the dance composition course I developed at UC Berkeley, entitled Experimenting with Embodied Histories: Social Memory as a Source for New Dance Techniques, asked students to draw from their personal and communal modes of moving in the world in order to create choreographed and improvised performance vignettes. The content the students developed culminated in a thirty-minute multimedia public performance, which experimented with the dance forms they brought with them, as well as their cultural or familial gestures, forms of physical play, and gendered ways of moving.

My university teaching experience includes instructing a wide range of students in a variety of formats, and I have ample experience with curriculum development and advising. My UC Berkeley courses included large lecture classes, small seminar classes, and studio-based classes with lower- and upper-division undergraduate students from across the spectrum of majors. At Stanford, my courses included MA, MFA, and Ph.D. students. Also, at Stanford, I developed the curriculum for the “Introduction to Dance Studies” courses for the department’s dance minor. This process included facilitating focus groups and conducting individual interviews with dance minors and practice-based faculty in order to craft a curriculum that responded to the needs and concerns of all stakeholders. My mentoring and advising experience includes having served as a reader for an MFA thesis in Dance at Mills College, directing independent studies, and advising a Stanford undergraduate student on turning her final paper – which analyzed how the British-South Asian choreographer Akram Khan’s performances challenge Western gender ideals – into a publication in the Stanford Undergraduate Journal in Anthropology.

In sum, I cultivate a classroom community that privileges embodied experience as a critical mode of comprehending and producing knowledge. My courses emphasize how performance fosters collaboration, social justice, and cultural resilience. My pedagogical objectives bring together diverse theories, methods, creative practices, objects, thinkers, and artists to give my students rigorous and engaging educational experiences that allow them to develop a wide range of professional and personal skills.