MISSION STATEMENT

Armenian Creatives is an artist-run press sustained by intimate collaborations and communal connections. We host the development of publications and disperse experimental diasporic expressions. Armenian Creatives began as a free-form get-together where artists and creative practitioners make food, read together, try out language, and share knowns along with imminent futures and hopes. As we gather, we practice listening to each other, cohabiting with each other’s differences, and transcribing our exchanges and convictions that question predominant modes of thought. Our imprint finds home in this position: our books host intimate settings that invite contributors to critically address movements of culture, express their voices, cultivate infectious creativity, and fabricate solidarities using the materials of printed matter.

EDITORS

KATIE GIRITLIAN is an artist and designer who carries the tools of publishing and photography to arrange settings for self-paced and communally-bound learning.

CAROLINE PARTAMIAN is a sound and visual artist influenced by her training in dance. She works closely with the concept of abreaction, the extraction of dormant memory stored within a muscle, resurfaced through physical movement, of which an individual was previously unaware.

MHER TARAKJIAN is a Syrian-Armenian architect and writer based in the US & France. After 10 years of practicing architecture in New York City, he is now pursuing multidisciplinary research at the Harvard University Design School.

CONTRIBUTORS

List of contributors to Armenian Creatives publications. This does not include everyone who has participated in gatherings,  or offered their presence.


KAMEE ABRAHAMIAN is an interdisciplinary artist, writer, producer, performer, director, organizer, caregiver, queerdo, waitress, and witch. Their work is steeped with relational and generative practices oriented towards ancestral reclamation, visionary fiction, and diasporic futurism.

CLEO ABRAMIAN lives and writes in Western Mass. She is currently working on her MFA at UMass Amherst’s poetry program.

ARPI ADAMYAN is a multimedia artist based in New York and Yerevan. She creates queer-feminist world building projects. The complex realities she makes are charged with historical citations and speculations of the futuristic biotechnological world.

ALEX ALECO is a mixed-media artist and researcher. They work with oral history, archives, horror genre, արեւմտահայերէն, and creative practice to explore and render visible queer Armenian diaspora experience across timelines and locations.

The ARMENIAN RECORD ARCHIVE (ARA) preserves and celebrates Armenian music from the homeland and the Diaspora. ARA aims to catalog and digitize analog Armenian musical recordings of the early 20th century—prioritizing 78RPM records most at-risk to deterioration beyond recovery.

HARRY BERBERIAN is a fundraiser for a human services organization in New York. He enjoys making-believe, connecting with Armenians over coffee and reading comic books.

ALI CAT. is an artist and print maker living at the confluence of two rivers in Portland, Oregon. She produces her work under the name Entangled Roots Press. Relief, screen, and letterpress prints span from the tenderness of cultural reclamation to the beauty of peoples movements. Ali’s prints pull from ancestral herstories and push towards liberatory futures, entangling lessons from gardens, symbols in coffee cups, woven threads from Armenia and Euskal Herria to the printed page.

ANGEL DERADOORIAN is a musician and Vedic Astrologer.

ALINA GREGORIAN is an artist, poet, and designer based in Brooklyn, NY. She curated and appeared in the exhibition Talk to me in Parsley and Tambourines.

OSHEEN HARRUTHOONYAN is a Canadian-Armenian photographer merging movement with themes of cultural heritage and renewal.

ALEXIA HATUN of diaspora -- preoccupied with language, in love with Hayeren; graduate student in Armenian Studies at UCLA, pursuing Western Armenian revitalization.

KNAR HOVAKIMYAN is an artist born in Armenia, raised in Los Angeles, and currently working in New York. She paints, draws, writes, and codes as part of an ever-expanding practice. Much of her work combines hand-crafted precision with the infinity of algorithms.

LINUS IGNATIUS Actor and a filmmaker based in NYC. As a character actor, he specializes in extreme dialects, off-beat personalities, and villains. As a filmmaker, his work twists together comedy and drama to create layered social commentary, dealing heavily with LGBTQIA+ issues, HIV awareness, and taboo psychological terrain.

CAYLAH JEAN LEAS is a New York City-based artist and set designer originally from Monterey Bay, California.

LEVON KAFAFIAN is a Detroit-based weaver working the narrative threads of costume, artifact, ritual and text into stories about possible worlds and potential futures. They infuse their stories and cloth with future ancestral practice, hybridity and magic.

TSOVINAR KUIUMCHIAN is an Anthropology PhD student based in Oxford, UK. Focusing on the world-building potential of creative media, she is writing an ethnography of contemporary Armenian art in the diaspora and in the homelands of Armenia and Turkey.

ARAM RONALDO KRIKORIAN is an Armenian Palestinian French Canadian queer zine maker living and working in NYC originally from California.

JUSTIN MAYFIELD, Musician/composer/audio engineer based in Brooklyn, NY. As a musician, he writes/records/performs with Sheen Marina and Tag Cloud, and also regularly plays guitar with the Brim, Miracle Sweepstakes, and Edna.

KOHAR MINASSIAN is a creator of videos and images.

REHAN MISKCI is a New York and Istanbul-based visual artist working in photography, video, and installation.

ANAHIT POGOSIAN is a visual artist and designer working between film, graphics and sculpture. Their protean studio practice explores themes of liminal space, interconnection, myth, ecology and movement. Unbound by material or tradition, they create a motley collection of physical to digital works that celebrate life.

EMILY STAMBOULIAN is a human in New York who has an internet radio show called Purely Circumstantial. She likes to record stories of synchronicity and funny sounds.

CASSANDRA TAVUKCIYAN is an archivist, researcher, and founder of Armenian Women Artists.

DEBORAH VALOMA is an artist, weaver, writer, curator, and professor at California College of the Arts. Her interdisciplinary practice addresses the role of textiles as holders of ancestral memory, signifiers of identity, and agents of cultural continuity.

HRAYR VARAZ 🐗 is a white, bearded queer cis-male Western Armenian-ist, Yelamu-based (SF)-based twitter-poet dancer linguist, sexpert intensity flow-er, 🌺ftografr🦋 author of #jivjiv #twitterpoem.

EMMA WELTY is an artist, educator, curator and writer. In her studio she is a weaver and researcher, interrogating her relationship to the loom through craft legacies, inherited muscle memory and the links between textiles and language.

ANAHID YAHJIAN is an independent writer, director and producer of experimental, documentary and narrative cinema.

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PACBI

Armenian Creatives joins the many small presses who are publicly pledging a commitment to PACBI (Palestinian Academic and Cultural Boycott of Israel). We stand in total solidarity with the people of Palestine, who continue to struggle for liberation against the ongoing genocidal violence of Western imperial and Zionist powers.


Specifically, we commit—where applicable—to:

• Boycott any cultural product commissioned by an official Israeli body;
• Boycott any cultural product funded by an official Israeli body, even if not commissioned;
• Boycott any cultural event that is partially or fully sponsored or funded by an official Israeli body;
• Refrain from participation in any form of academic and cultural cooperation, collaboration, or joint projects with Israeli institutions, including suspension of all forms of funding and subsidies to/from these institutions;
• Refrain from hosting or circulating any events or cultural products operating under the auspices of “normalization”, or which advance a false symmetry between oppressed and oppressor;
• Support Palestinian academic and cultural institutions directly without requiring them to partner with Israeli counterparts as an explicit or implicit condition for such support.

As specified in the PACBI guidelines, the campaigns reject boycotts of individuals based on identity, and targets institutions and organizations which represent, extend, or normalize the state’s political interests. More information at https://bdsmovement.net/pacbi.