ARMENIAN

ՀԱՅ


CREATIVES

ՍՏԵՂԾԱԳՈՐԾՆԵՐ

ARMENIAN

ՀԱՅ 

CREATIVES

ՍՏԵՂԾԱԳՈՐԾՆԵՐ

MISSION STATEMENT


Armenian Creatives meet to exchange developments in our artistic ideas and identities. A free-form get-together provides the setting to discuss projects that may or may not have to do with being Armenian, cultivating a community of integral support and infectious creativity.  Initiated to hold a space that we couldn’t find prior, through these gatherings we aim to empower and liberate inventiveness, imagination, and individuality—sharing our different knowns along with our imminent futures and hopes.

These monthly meetings may manifest over a meal cooked together, as well as through publication, printed or digital. We aim to archive a portion of each gathering, not only to tell stories of the past, or to exist for future eyes, but to balance the presence shared in a moment.

Armenian Creatives formed in Brooklyn, NY, but with the natural momentums of members following new dreams we now find ourselves in various corners of the world and aim to touch base through satellite choreography as much as possible. A majority of us still find ourselves in New York.

MEMBERS


List of members who have attended Armenian Creatives meetings since July 2018, whether one or every single meeting


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.

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.

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.

GAMAR MARKARIAN

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.

LEAH McCLOSKY is an artist and illustrator currently based in Brooklyn, NY.

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.

ALEX ORORIAN ALECO is a multimedia artist/maker originally from Glendale, CA. They’re interested in liminal spaces of queer and diasporic SWANA identities, and connecting with others through art expression. They make videos, lo-fi, romantic pop-rock music, drawings, and handpoked tattoos. Some of the repeating themes in their work include sapphic-galactic romance, body transformation, the supernatural, and queer monstrosity. They’re currently completing their undergraduate degree in Gender, Sexuality, and Womxn’s Studies at The University of Pittsburgh.

SOUREN PAPAZIAN

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.

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.

MHER TARAKJIAN is a Syrian-Armenian architect based in the US. After 10 years of practicing architecture in New York City, he is now pursuing multidisciplinary research at the Harvard University design school.

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

ROUBINA TUTUNJIAN is a designer and strategist currently based in Manhattan, NY.

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.

RAFFI WARTANIAN is a multiplatform storyteller passionate about social justice, creativity, and innovative institutions.

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.

OUR SUPPORTERS


2022
We are immensely grateful for the generous support of The Calouste Gulbenkian Foundation, who believed in the Those Words, That Offer To Us project and gave us the resources to translate our engagement with language into a reality.



2020
We are humbled by the support of many who generously helped fund our first publication project Armenian Creatives Publication 01:

Aaron Cantrell

Adam Lenz

Adam Michel

Adi Ignatius

Alex Kruper

Ali

Angeline Meitzler

Anonymous

Anonymous

Ara Oshagan

Arek Feredjian

Argyro Nicolauo

Ashley Thomas

Audra Wolowiec

Babken DerGrigorian

Berj Tenguerian

Cansu Guney

Caylah Leas

Christopher Janigian

Chrys Nodal

Claire Holl

Colin Carpenter

Courtney Gray

Daniel Asdourian

Danielle Kinoshita

Danielle Williams

Elizabeth Cresson

Emily Stamboulian

Emma Welty

Gabrielle Boyadjian Benitez

Gegham Mughnetsyan

Gor Jihanian

Haig Nazarian

Hande Iscen

Hande Oynar

Nergis K

Hyperallergic

Jenna Homen

Jennifer Ciarleglio

Jirair Khorozian

John Ostrander

KALLIOPI CAROLINE BOUROS

Kathleen Hansen

Kelsa Kuchera

Lara Sarkissian

Lauren Stern

Leah McCloskey

Lilit Karapetyan

Linda Ravul

Lucinda Klarich-Kahn

Mansi Shah

Mher Tarakjian

Mikala Kuchera

Mira Dayal

Monet Oganesian

Nancy Agabian

Nar Gulvartian

Nicole Haroutunian

Norayr + Yvonne Minassian

Nurhan Becidyan

Penelope Phylactopoulos

Rehan Miskci

Roubina Tutunjian

Roxane Ilias

rozit arditi

Ryan C Paradiso/NECK

Sar

Sarah B. Ignatius

Shannon Byrne (Song a Day)

Sossy Partamian

Taleen Kalenderian

Tiana Garoogian