A Dance with Creativity: Lidiya's Narrative of Integration and Innovation

In the first episode of the Human Presence Podcast, Victoria interviews Lidiya Dervisheva, an Eastern European-born engineer, artist, and venture capitalist living in the U.S., whom she met through ecstatic dance on a San Francisco beach. Lidiya describes integrating formerly separate “buckets” of creativity and career into a single identity and explains how her love of music and movement- from raves in Bulgaria to competitive ballroom dance- led her to ecstatic dance. Frustrated by inconsistent DJ sets, she learned to DJ for her first Burning Man in 2019, paused during COVID, then returned in 2022 and was invited to play a main stage. She reflects on navigating male-dominated fields, lessons from investing (iterating and fixing what’s broken), energy management through systems, sleep, and health, and staying authentic by bringing her full self to professional and social spaces.