Sarah Ashford Hart
Performance Studies
Sarah Ashford Hart is a socially engaged performance practitioner, scholar, and educator from a Canadian-Venezuelan-American family background. Over the past twelve years she has developed her arts practice in Russia, England, Venezuela, Chile and the United States. Her work explores participatory techniques for generating social dialogue across barriers of cultural difference, by creating multilingual spaces to explore the mutability of “belonging” and “community.” She has facilitated projects that voiced the stories of refugees in rural England, developed the communication skills of inner-city youth in New York, enhanced the interactive pedagogical tools of English teachers in Caracas, and visibilized the perspectives of inmates in Chilean prisons. Her PhD research in Performance Studies at UC Davis focuses on establishing a participatory methodology for the self-expression of experiences of mobility and enclosure, specifically among incarcerated, indigenous, and migrant women and children in California and Chile. Mapping ethical guidelines for engaging participants with diverse perspectives on migration as protagonists in artistic/academic dialogues, her performance practice/research explores intersections between “self” and “other,” ”local” and “foreign,” performer and audience, participant and facilitator.