Her father used to tell her, “For people like us, art doesn’t put food on the table,” and Sarvenaz Ahmadi had to abandon her dream of studying theatre. Years later, in the women’s ward of Evin Prison, she brought that dream to life with a few chairs and a plastic table, staging a play in which imprisoned women spoke about their experiences of work and life. Before her imprisonment, Sarvenaz had worked as a social worker supporting working children and Afghan migrant families. She also translated feminist writings that explored women’s unpaid labour and social inequalities. Today, through her comic character “Ms Ahmadi,” she challenges gender stereotypes. From social work to prison and comedy, one concern has remained constant: creating space for those whose voices are so often overlooked to be seen and heard.
The “Woman, Life, Freedom” uprising did not emerge in a vacuum. Before it, women, queer people and activists working in writing and journalism, art and culture, civil society and everyday life had, through their sustained work and resistance, helped lay some of its social and intellectual foundations. The series Before That September revisits the lives, work and legacies of those whose contributions to these foundations have received less attention in dominant narratives of the movement. Its purpose is not to rewrite the past as an inevitable prelude to revolution, but to understand a history in which many voices have yet to be heard. These portraits of people who helped shape “Woman, Life, Freedom” are part of the Voices in Exile project.
“Where is Ms Ahmadi herself, then?”
This was the question asked by families Sarvenaz Ahmadi had supported as a social worker for years. Some still did not know she had been imprisoned. They would call her mother, Soudabeh Balali, and say that when Sarvenaz was around, she had looked after them more closely. Soudabeh later recounted in a report by Maryam Lotfi in the newspaper Shargh that one family had suggested going to the prison with several working children to ask the judge to release “Ms Ahmadi.”
At the time, Sarvenaz was being held in Evin Prison’s women’s ward. She was a social worker who had spent years working with women, working children and Afghan migrant families in deprived neighbourhoods of southern Tehran, including Darvazeh Ghar. Before her arrest, much of her time had been devoted to securing identity documents, access to education and social services for those she supported. In the same report, Leili Arshad, one of the founders of Khaneh Khorshid (House of the Sun), recalled how Sarvenaz would repeatedly visit government offices to obtain birth certificates for the people she worked with.
One of the children Sarvenaz knew was named Heshmat. In a letter she wrote from Evin Prison during Nowruz in March 2024, she recalled the day she travelled to the Asgarabad detention camp to prevent the deportation of nine-year-old Heshmat and his father to Afghanistan. Heshmat had come to Iran after the Taliban returned to power. When Sarvenaz first met him, he had a stutter caused by anxiety and his experiences of war. His condition was improving, and his stutter was gradually easing, when he and his father were arrested. At the detention camp, Heshmat was asked whether he wanted to return to Afghanistan with his father or stay in Iran with “the lady,” meaning Sarvenaz. Heshmat chose to stay.
A nine-year-old child, faced with a choice between his father and the country he had fled, preferred to be separated from his father rather than return.
In her letter, Sarvenaz wrote that whenever she thought about that day, she still wondered what a child must have endured in his homeland to choose separation from his father rather than going back. She had no answer to that question. Nor do we know what subsequently happened to Heshmat.
Sarvenaz had studied social work at the University of Social Welfare and Rehabilitation Sciences in Tehran. In the years leading up to September 2022, she worked with grassroots organisations supporting working children and sought to improve access to education and social services for disadvantaged children, particularly Afghan migrants. In her Nowruz letter, she wrote that she had spent around six years getting to know and working with Afghan migrants.
But her activities went beyond social work. She also wrote about the economic and social relations that depend on migrant labour while refusing to recognise migrants’ rights. In an interview about anti-migrant sentiment in Iran, she addressed precisely this contradiction: the urban economy benefits from the labour of Afghan migrants while simultaneously portraying those same workers as a threat to employment opportunities for Iranian citizens.
For the people Sarvenaz worked with, migration, discrimination, misogyny, poverty and exclusion from education were not separate problems. A child without identity documents might be denied access to school. A family unable to obtain legal employment would be forced to work under unequal conditions. And a woman who bore the responsibility of caring for children and family members would not necessarily receive any wages for the work she performed every day.
Alongside her social work, Sarvenaz translated feminist texts, including Revolution at Point Zero by Silvia Federici, the contemporary Italian-American feminist theorist whose writings examine women’s domestic and care work. Federici has shown how labour essential to the reproduction of life and the survival of the economy often remains unpaid and invisible.
One of the central questions in Federici’s work concerns which activities are recognised as work and whose labour is denied that recognition. In the homes and neighbourhoods of southern Tehran, Sarvenaz encountered people for whom this was far more than a theoretical question: mothers responsible for caring for their families and children forced to choose between attending school and contributing to their households’ livelihoods.
A few months later, in September 2022, Mahsa Jina Amini died after being detained by Iran’s morality police, sparking the “Woman, Life, Freedom” revolution. On 6 November 2022, security forces arrested Sarvenaz. She was released on bail on 7 December. In February 2023, she was sentenced to a total of six years in prison on charges of “assembly and collusion” and “propaganda against the state.” In response, she wrote:
“I was sentenced to six years in prison by the court of first instance. But this sentence was worth it. It was worth the profound sense of belonging to a large and powerful collective patiently striving to take its destiny into its own hands. It was worth every bit of it.”
Her sentence was reduced to three years and six months on appeal. On 28 April 2023, shortly before International Workers’ Day, Sarvenaz was arrested again at the home of Mohammad Habibi, a teachers’ union activist.
She continued translating and writing in prison. Her translation of The Power of Women and the Subversion of the Community, by Mariarosa Dalla Costa and Selma James, which examines the relationship between women’s unpaid domestic labour and the capitalist economy, was published during her imprisonment. She dedicated the translation to her mother’s voice and hair.
But at Evin, Sarvenaz also found an opportunity to return to an old dream, one she had abandoned years earlier as a teenager.
Sarvenaz and her brother Saleh grew up in a family where the constraints of working-class life and circumstances seemed to leave little room for dreaming. Yet their futures would show that neither had given up hope. When Sarvenaz was a teenager, she wanted to study theatre. Her father, Ali Ahmadi, objected. According to Sarvenaz, he told her, “For people like us, art doesn’t put food on the table.” He wanted his daughter to study science and become a doctor. He feared that she would remain a worker like him and face the same hardships.
Years later, Sarvenaz recalled this memory in an article about a play she created in Evin Prison.
On 3 May 2024, at 5:30 p.m., the recreation hall in Evin Prison’s women’s ward was transformed into a makeshift courtroom. Chairs were arranged for the older prisoners, while others sat on exercise mats. A plastic table had been brought in to provide percussion. An elderly woman, playing the representative of housewives, stood beside a table of refreshments.
The play, Workers’ Grievances Against the Wheel of Oppression, was about the experience of work. But Sarvenaz did not want simply to speak about workers in her own voice.
Before the performance, she had interviewed prisoners with experience in different occupations and incorporated their responses into the script. She played the role of the judge. Other women appeared as complainants, while members of the audience could enter the performance as witnesses, confirming, adding to or challenging the complainants’ accounts. As Parisa Sardashti wrote for Radio Zamaneh, Sarvenaz saw herself more as a facilitator than a director. The idea was not for someone to present a ready-made truth to an audience. The prisoners themselves would speak about their experiences of work, while the spectators would participate in shaping the narrative. When the performance ended, the conversation about work continued. Sarvenaz later wrote that hearing some audience members say, “We really are workers too,” was, for her, a sign of the play’s success.
In that recreation hall, with only a few chairs, exercise mats and a plastic table, something had taken place that Sarvenaz had spent years thinking about through her translations and social work: people whose labour was rarely recognised were speaking about their own experiences and taking part in telling the stories of their lives.
Perhaps when her father said that art would not put food on the table for “people like us,” he had never imagined a stage like this: a place where imprisoned women, with different experiences of work and life, could become both the subjects and the storytellers of their own performance.
But before creating this play, Sarvenaz had also written in her Nowruz letter about another child: 12-year-old Yahya, an Afghan migrant. One of Yahya’s classmates had told him that the authorities were going to round up Afghans and that he would no longer be allowed to work on the metro. Upset by what he had heard, Yahya called Sarvenaz’s mother, Soudabeh, to tell her what had happened. Writing from prison, Sarvenaz said she had still been unable to call Yahya to wish him a happy Nowruz. She did not know what she would say if he asked why his New Year was different from that of Iranian children.
In the same letter, she called on those involved in “Woman, Life, Freedom” to clarify whose lives and whose freedom their demands were intended to embrace. She did not want the struggle against gender discrimination to produce a society that continued to deny others the right to an equal life on the grounds of nationality and class.
This question is central to understanding Sarvenaz’s work. For her, women’s freedom cannot be separated from class relations, the situation of migrants or the rights of children forced to work. The same woman who translated texts about unpaid domestic labour worked every day with families who had little choice but to send their children to work to make ends meet. And in prison, she created a performance in which women themselves could speak about the meaning of work.
Sarvenaz also faced serious health problems while imprisoned. In September 2024, protesting the denial of medical leave and conditional release, she stopped taking her essential medication. Following a period of medical leave, she was eventually released conditionally from Evin Prison on 29 December 2024.
During the Iranian calendar year corresponding to 2025–26, her translation of The Patriarchy of the Wage by Silvia Federici, completed during her time in Evin, was published. Her play, Workers’ Grievances Against the Wheel of Oppression, also appeared in print that year.
Sarvenaz has now turned to another form of performance: stand-up comedy.
On her Instagram account, @sarvahmadi, she publishes comedy videos featuring her character “Ms Ahmadi,” the presenter of a programme called Sarvi Reports. In these performances, she uses humour to explore the stereotypes surrounding women’s lives, gender norms and the expectations that are supposed to determine how women behave and what choices they make.
The workers’ courtroom in Evin Prison is gone. This time, Sarvenaz is exploring another possibility offered by performance: laughter.
Things that seem natural and self-evident in everyday life can become absurd when placed in a comic situation. A woman expected to speak, behave, dress and organise her life according to prescribed rules can now turn those very expectations into objects of ridicule.
This is not an unfamiliar direction in Sarvenaz’s work. The same questions about labour, the body and women’s lives that appeared in her translations now find their way into comedy, challenging the norms of everyday life through humour. Yet her comedy should not be understood merely as a humorous translation of feminist theory. Through this work, Sarvenaz has returned to acting, something she had loved since adolescence and once believed she might have lost forever.
And her character is called “Ms Ahmadi.” It is the very name by which the families she once supported asked after her while she was in prison. We do not know whether this choice of name is deliberate. The earlier “Ms Ahmadi” visited government offices to obtain birth certificates for children and follow up on families’ cases. The new “Ms Ahmadi” presents a comedy programme that uses humour to question the rules imposed on women’s lives.
Between these two images lie years of social work, translation, imprisonment and writing. But perhaps what connects them is Sarvenaz’s attention to the lives of people on whose behalf others so often speak: a migrant child whose fate is decided by others; a woman whose domestic labour is not recognised as work; or women whose behaviour and clothing are governed by rules society has already set for them.
Throughout these experiences, Sarvenaz has explored, in different ways, the possibility of speaking, being seen and telling one’s own story.
Although her father once feared that art could not provide a livelihood for a family like theirs, Sarvenaz never became a doctor. She became a social worker, translated books and, years later, created a play in Evin Prison’s women’s ward with a few chairs and exercise mats, a performance that left its audience discussing its themes long after it ended. And now, outside prison, she sits calmly in front of a camera and performs comedy.
We still do not know what Sarvi Reports will become. Perhaps the project will continue; perhaps it will take on new forms. But the girl who once wanted to study theatre, only to be told that “art doesn’t put food on the table for people like us,” and who later became one of those who helped shape “Woman, Life, Freedom,” has found her own stage once again. It is a new stage, but on it she remains the same performer she has always been: one who unsettles the accepted order of a patriarchal world, making us laugh at its absurdity through her humour and skill.