Our founder, Lerna Babikyan, has been offering training in dance, improvisation, creativity development, choreography production, and creative dance instructor training to various age groups in schools, art workshops, and artist residency programs in Turkey and numerous countries around the world since 1997. Throughout these processes, she has joyfully observed that participants' relationship with dance has led to the development of their physical potential, mental well-being, and ability to connect with life, further enriching this relationship over time.
In this way, she has come to see that another kind of dance and dance education is possible, beyond class-based, social, and gendered stereotypes that dominate traditional perspectives on dance education, such as "talent is required," "not everyone can do it," "you can't dance everywhere," and "it’s inappropriate." To expand the benefits of her work to a wider audience, she began offering instructor training programs on this subject in 2015 and took them into the institutional field by founding Mudita Dance in 2019. She created the "Learn Through Dance" workshops for anyone who wishes to develop themselves through dance. Along this journey, she collaborates with like-minded instructors and artists from both Turkey and abroad, sharing the same dreams and values.