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. This does not include everyone who has attended a meeting 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.

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.

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.

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


2023
We are deeply touched by the support we received for our new anthology Book Armenian Creatives Publication 02:

Alina Bezdikian

Anonymous

Georgik

Harry Berberian

Leah Anoush McCloskey

Lena Shefelman

Mireille Keuroghlian

Sossy Partamian

Tsovinar Kuiumchian

Vahe Shirikjian



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:


Adam Michel

Adi Ignatius

Ali Cat

Anonymous

Anonymous

Babken DerGrigorian

Caylah Jean Leas

Chrys Nodal

Claire Holl

Daniel Asdourian

Emily Stamboulian

Emma Welty

Gegham Mughnetsyan

Haig Nazarian

Harry Berberian

Jenna Paints

Jennifer Ciarleglio

Jirair Khorozian

Kathleen Hansen

Kelsa Kuchera

Leah McCloskey

Mansi Shah

Mher Tarakjian

Mikala Kuchera

Nancy Agabian

Nurhan Becidyan

Rehan Miskci

Roxane Ilias

Sar

Sarah Ignatius

Sossy Partamian

Yvonne Minassian