An advanced Anthropology course with faculty member Trip Powers during her senior year helped unlock her intellectual passion. “That was the beginning,” she says. “It was just fascinating to me—learning about how people live, how they have lived, and how that’s changed. I remember realizing: ‘Getting paid to travel around the world and write things about interesting people and interesting cultures—that’s a job?’”

Zahedi has spent the years since proving that it is. She earned her bachelor’s degree in anthropology and archaeology at SUNY New Paltz after gathering credits at other institutions of higher learning, including Dickinson and Green Mountain colleges. Heritage preservation and horticulture were the focus of her early work out of college.

Today, Pardis works as an Exhibit Specialist and Project Lead for the National Park Service, Historic Preservation Training Center, through which she leads historic preservation projects in National Parks across the Southeastern United States and U.S. Caribbean territories. In her spare time, she works as an independent archaeological consultant and serves on the boards of the St. George Village Botanical Garden and Finding Your Archives a Home (FYAH), and as the Vice President of the St. Croix Archaeological Society, through which she offers her expertise in community heritage, museum development, and preservation. Though she recently completed her PhD, she sees her work as just beginning.

“This work is about relationships,” she says. “It’s about listening. And it’s about giving people tools to tell their own stories.” As the only archaeologist currently living in St. Croix, she continues to build tools, foster trust, and bring buried histories to the surface—one site, one story, one conversation at a time.

CLICK HERE TO READ THE COMPLETE ARTICLE ABOUT PARDIS PUBLISHED IN THE SUMMER 2025 MILLBROOK MAGAZINE