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Lerna Babikyan Hayes

Dancer, Educator & Writer

Biography

Lerna Babikyan is a transdisciplinary artist, educator, and writer whose work explores the transformative potential of movement, creativity, and embodied learning. Drawing from her background in dance, adult education, and ecology, she investigates the intersections of identity, language, memory, place, and more-than-human relationships through somatic research, participatory performance, and storytelling. Rooted in ecological awareness and relational ways of knowing, her practice creates spaces for connection, cultural learning, and creative inquiry. She works with diverse learning communities across local and international contexts, facilitating workshops, performances, and educational programmes for children, adults, educators, artists, and community groups. Lerna holds BA degrees in Dance and Adult Education, and an MA in Movement, Mind and Ecology from Schumacher College, England. Her master’s research, Experiencing Armenian Language Through Ecosomatic Interdisciplinary Performativities, explored how participatory performance can support language learning, cultural diversity, empathy, and ecological awareness through embodied experience. With more than 25 years of professional experience across educational settings, public spaces, community projects, and cultural institutions, she continues to develop movement-based approaches to learning, participation, and collective meaning-making. Currently, her research and creative practice focus on place-based sense-making, mythology, belonging, and the relationships between body, culture, and landscape.

Key Projects

Embodied Learning; Theory-Context-Practice

Embodied Learning is a 10-week online/hybrid training programme designed for educators, artists, facilitators, and learning professionals who wish to integrate the body more fully into their teaching and learning practices. Bridging theory, context, and praxis, the programme offers an in-depth exploration of how movement, perception, and embodied experience can support learning, creativity, and relational awareness. Participants engage with embodied approaches not only as practical methods, but also as ways of understanding, creating, and relating to the world. Grounded in somatic practices, the training invites participants to experience learning through the body while critically reflecting on their own educational, artistic, and professional contexts. The programme situates embodied learning within broader social, cultural, and ecological frameworks, encouraging participants to question dominant educational models and explore more inclusive, responsive, and relational approaches to learning.

Ecology Based Creative Dance Teacher Training

Ecology Based Creative Dance Teacher Training is a comprehensive teacher training module designed for those who wish to rediscover the body as a part of nature, connect movement with ecological cycles, and pass this awareness on to others through the methodology of creative dance. We aim to develop more than just a “dance technique”; we strive for a sustainable way of living and teaching by building a bridge between the rhythms of nature and our own internal rhythms.

Media

Մտաշարժում

This video explores the future of Armenian identity through embodied practice. Moving away from fixed or idealised notions of identity, the work approaches it as fluid, relational, and continuously unfolding—shaped through the body, memory, gesture, and imagination. Beginning from bodily resistance and listening, the movement draws on ancestral gestures, ecological awareness, and questioning as tools for dreaming otherwise. The work proposes dreaming as an embodied, co-creational act and invites the body to guide new ways of perceiving, relating, and imagining shared futures. This video work was selected for inclusion in the Armenian Institute’s “Dreams for the Future” project, 2026 https://www.armenianinstitute.org.uk/lerna-babikyan