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Zahra Fuladvand is a performance artist and researcher whose practice investigates environmental performance and audience engagement within unconventional spaces. Her work focuses on how bodies, spaces, and audiences interact in real environments—metro stations, rooftops, streets, or architectural sites—where scenography emerges through lived experience rather than traditional stage design. She holds a BA and MA from Tehran Art University and completed her DLA (Doctor of Liberal Arts) at the Hungarian University of Fine Arts in 2022. Her doctoral dissertation, Community, Place and Environment in Ritual Performance, examined the relationship between ritual, spatial environment, and community through Persian Passion Theatre and contemporary site-specific performance practices. 

Fuladvand’s artistic practice explores how social and political structures influence visibility, belonging, and exclusion in public space. Working between Iranian and Hungarian cultural contexts, she often positions the audience as an active participant within the scenographic environment. Her performances frequently draw from ritual gestures and sensory elements—movement, sound, smell, and spatial orientation—to create immersive situations where viewers become aware of their own presence within the work. Rather than separating stage and spectator, her performances blur these boundaries, inviting audiences to reflect on their own role in shaping meaning. 

Since 2019, Fuladvand has developed a series of performances and video works in non-theatrical settings. Projects such as The Mirror (Budapest Metro Line 2, 2019), 14Days (hospital room,2019), 280 Days (Sreet in front of Artist Building,2020), Rootedness (Profil Gallery,2022) Human-Tree (CEU Budapest, 2024), My daughter/me/my mom(ISBN+, 2025) address questions of migration, identity, and cultural perception. Through minimal yet symbolic actions,her work examines how bodies marked as “other” are perceived within everyday environments. These performances function as experiential inquiries into the politics of visibility and the emotional landscape of displacement. 

Alongside her artistic practice, Fuladvand contributes to international academic and artistic discourse. Her research has been presented at conferences and symposia including the Prague Quadrennial (PQ Talks, 2023) and the Stipendium Hungaricum PhD Conference. She co-authored the publication “Transformation of the Found Environment in Persian Passion Theatre” (CEAA, 2021) and has written on ritual, environment, and performance in relation to scenography and audience perception. Through both practice and research, Fuladvand continues to explore how environmental performance can transform everyday spaces into sites of reflection, participation, and collective awareness.