Heather Rastovac Akbarzadeh

Heather Rastovac Akbarzadeh (she/her/hers) is a community-engaged scholar, artist, and educator with two decades of experience as a dancer-choreographer, artistic director, curator, and dramaturg among diasporic MENA/SWANA communities. Since 1997, she has performed in street performances, activist circuses, MENA/SWANA cultural events, and full evening dance works on concert stages. Heather earned her Ph.D. in Performance Studies from UC Berkeley with a Designated Emphasis in Women, Gender, and Sexuality, where she completed a dissertation on diasporic Iranian dancers and performance artists. Following her doctoral studies, she was the Mellon Postdoctoral Fellow in Dance Studies in the Department of Theater and Performance Studies at Stanford University (2016 - 2018) and the University of California Chancellor’s Postdoctoral Fellow in the Department of Asian American Studies at UC Davis (2018 – 2020). She is currently working on her first book manuscript, Choreographing the Iranian Diaspora: Dance, Spectatorship, and the War on Terror, which has been selected for the Dance Studies Association’s “Series in Dance History” 2019 First-time Author Mentorship Program. Heather’s publications include chapters in Futures of Dance Studies (University of Wisconsin Press, 2020) and in Performing Iran: Cultural Identity and Theatrical Performance (I.B. Tauris Press, 2021).