Lerna Babikyan is a movement-based interdisciplinary artist, educator, and writer whose practice explores the transformative and fluid intelligence of dance, learning, and creativity. She holds BA degrees in Dance and Adult Education, and an MA in Movement, Mind, and Ecology from Schumacher College. 

Her work moves fluidly between studio, classroom, stage and landscape, offering teacher training, participatory performances and workshops in creative dance, embodied learning, and creativity both locally and internationally.  At the heart of this practice is a commitment to nurturing authentic self-expression across all ages, while cultivating responsive and inclusive relationships with the self, community, and the more-than-human world.

Her creative and pedagogical work weaves together themes of body, identity, memory, ecology, pedagogy, indigenous knowledge systems, language, and space. Through embodied practices, she intertwines dance, storytelling, and ecological awareness—crafting spaces where creativity becomes a site of healing, remembrance, and future imagining.

Babikyan has shared her artistic research and pedagogical approaches also through presentations at local and international conferences, contributing to ongoing dialogues around embodiment, ecology, and creative education.

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 book has been written as a guide to move beyond the “guest” status of dance in the lives of individuals living in postmodern society, aiming to bring dance back to the center as a vital, educational, and artistic activity—to experience it anew.

Creative Dance has long been used across the world both as an artistic activity and as an alternative educational tool, without enforced imitation, pressure, or comparison. Suitable for individuals of all ages who wish to explore their bodies through dance and discover their unique expression, creative dance practices not only nurture the physical and mental creativity of children and adults but also support the development of a positive body image beyond conventional notions of “beauty” and beyond gender norms.

They invite us to live a life in harmony with and awareness of our bodies, to engage with the world in a playful, body-centered space that transcends words, and to learn and teach abstract and concrete concepts through dance.

The book is written in Turkish by Lerna Babikyan, to spread the creative dance culture in Turkey, including history of creative dance, lesson plans, family activities and embodied learning through dance; published in 2022 by Töz Publishing House; ISBN number 9786057186409