Beloved Sara Zaltash (b.1985, Reading UK) is a British-Iranian artist, astrologer, and spiritual practitioner. Founder of Interstellar Animism, a cosmological practice of writing, counsel, and celestial music committed to restoring felt relationship between human beings and the living cosmos. Supported by the British Council, Arts Council England, and others.
“Zaltash is electrifying… See her if you can." The Guardian.
I was born in Reading to Iranian parents who carried with them the imprint of revolution. Growing up between cultures and languages, between the Iran of memory and the England that shaped me, I learned early that the sky belongs to everyone.
The cosmological knowledge I carry is not reconstructed. It lives through the Sufi lineage written into my blood and bones, through decades of disciplined study across Islam, Christianity, Buddhism, earth-based Judaism, and animist practice, and through an astrological inheritance that can be traced from ancient Babylon, through the Islamic Golden Age, into living practice today. My greatest teacher remains the living wilderness of the sky.
Formally, I trained in theatre, performance, and Persian language and literature, with studies across Bristol, Tehran, and Leeds. I am a Research Fellow of the Schumacher Institute, a Fellow of the St Ethelburga's Centre for Reconciliation and Peace, and a graduate of the Spiritual Directors International New Contemplatives programme. Ancestral lineage healing, grief tending, counselling skills, dreamwork, Quranic Arabic, and years of astrological study have deepened and extended this foundation.
As an artist and performer, my practice moves across disciplines, continents, and the threshold between the sacred and the secular. It has been supported by the British Council, Arts Council England, the United Nations, Watershed, MAYK, and the University of Bristol and University of Exeter.
I’ve performed, stage managed, and hosted across festival stages throughout the UK and Europe, including Glastonbury Festival, Fusion Festival, Shambala Festival, Medicine Festival, Burning Man, Nowhere Festival, Borderland Festival, and Latitude Festival, alongside playing key organising roles within major environmental movements.
My work has been written about by The Guardian, BBC, ITV, The New York Times, Haaretz and OpenDemocracy.
I have made work in public space and private rooms, built communities where none existed, and held people at the threshold of experiences for which their lives had not yet prepared them.
Privately, I work as an astrologer and spiritual director, accompanying individuals through complex and consequential thresholds.
Everything I have made, studied, and lived is now gathering into Interstellar Animism.