We are delighted to announce that Sashar Zarif has been named the 2025 Selma Jeanne Cohen Dance Lecture Awardee. An internationally acclaimed artist, educator, and researcher, Zarif will share his groundbreaking work as part of this distinguished lecture on October 25 at the Fulbright Association’s 48th Annual Conference in Miami, FL. This prestigious award recognizes exceptional contributions to dance as a vehicle for cultural exchange, scholarship, and international understanding.
Sashar Zarif is an internationally acclaimed multidisciplinary artist, educator, and researcher whose work explores the body as a living archive of memory, ritual, and transformation. For more than three decades, his practice has spanned more than forty countries, dissolving boundaries between dance, music, storytelling, and scholarship.
Born in Tehran to an Azerbaijani family with deep cultural ties across Central and Western Asia, Zarif has made Toronto his home for the past 37 years. From this migratory vantage point, his work draws upon ancestral wisdom while engaging with contemporary inquiry, creating spaces where art is more than expression — it becomes a pathway of knowledge, resonance, and renewal.
At the heart of Zarif’s practice lies an embodied ethnographic approach in which research, creation, education, and performance exist as a continuum rather than separate disciplines. His inquiries explore how memory lives in the body, how sound carries emotion across generations, and how movement transforms both individual and collective experience. Through long-term engagements with communities across Central and Western Asia, Africa, and Southeast Asia, Zarif has cultivated an ever-evolving dialogue between tradition and transformation.
Zarif’s signature methodologies — Moving Memories and the Dance of Mugham — merge Sufi, Shamanic, and Central Asian ritualistic practices with contemporary approaches to embodied research. These frameworks investigate how heritage can be experienced rather than merely preserved, creating works that invite both audiences and participants into a shared process of remembering and becoming.
Over the past thirty years, Zarif has conducted extensive fieldwork documenting dance traditions, ritual practices, and cultural memory across four continents. This research has shaped a portfolio of award-winning choreographic works, internationally presented through the Sashar Zarif Dance Theatre, which he founded to house and tour his creations. He has collaborated with iconic wisdom holders such as Mugham master Alim Qasimov and Komuz virtuoso Nurak Abdurahmanov, deepening his intercultural explorations and bridging modal music, embodied ritual, and contemporary performance.
Beyond the stage, Zarif is a dedicated educator and mentor. His teaching philosophy, which he calls reconstructive education, seeks to dissolve divisions between traditional knowledge and contemporary creativity. Through residencies, workshops, and mentorships, he has worked with emerging and established artists across Canada, the U.S., Europe, Central and Western Asia, and Africa. By cultivating spaces where the thinking body, sounding body, and moving body intersect, he nurtures a generation of creators who engage with cultural heritage as a living, evolving practice. Zarif’s work creates spaces where heritage is not only preserved but continually revisited and reimagined.
Recipient of numerous national and international awards, Zarif also serves as honorary faculty at several universities worldwide, where his teaching bridges scholarship, embodied practice, and community dialogue.
Rooted in Toronto, Zarif continues to work internationally and, through his lifelong practice, has shaped what is now the Centre for Living Heritage — a home for his work and a platform for cross-cultural exchange and embodied research.
Through his artistic, educational, and scholarly contributions, Sashar Zarif has become an internationally recognized voice in the fields of dance, cultural studies, and embodied knowledge. Across his creations and collaborations, he invites audiences, artists, and communities to reconsider how we embody memory, negotiate belonging, and imagine new possibilities of being together.
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