Mona Hedayati is a PhD student in the research-creation stream of Interdisciplinary Humanities program at Concordia and the digital arts doctorate program between St Lucas School of Arts and University of Antwerp in Belgium. She has a BA in translation studies, an MFA in digital media and an MRes in social-political art and design. Her recent research-creation projects have been focused on issues around destruction of material culture due to war and conflict as well as looting, plundering and theft of cultural heritage in parallel with forced migration.

Her PhD project is an endeavor to translate personal narratives of forced migrants into sensory outputs such as light, haptics and temperature as a way to capture the ineffability of such lived experiences through creating an embodied experience for audiences who have not gone through forced migration. She is particularly interested in applying sensory ethnography as a participatory method to gauge the impact of the experience on sensory involvement and adjustment of the audience.