Sona Tatoyan’s work explores what becomes possible when we remain inside contradiction long enough for perception to change.

Born in Baltimore to Syrian-Armenian parents, raised in rural Indiana and Alabama, and shaped by summers in Aleppo, Sona grew up between places, languages, histories, and competing accounts of the world. That experience became the ground of a practice that brings personal narrative, ancestral history, irreverent comedy, music, and contemplative inquiry into live encounter.

At Wake Forest University she was mentored by Dr. Maya Angelou, whose example formed her understanding of storytelling as an artistic, ethical, and spiritual practice. She then spent more than two decades as an actor in theater and film before her practice turned toward the work she makes now.

In 2017, as Rudolf Arnheim Guest Artist Professor at Humboldt University in Berlin, Sona worked with refugee students while developing Hakawati and testing storytelling as both a communal and spiritual practice. In February 2019 she returned to her family’s war-scarred home in Aleppo and rediscovered a trunk containing 180 hand-painted Karagöz shadow puppets made by her great-great-grandfather, Abkar Knadjian, in Urfa. According to family testimony, Abkar carried the puppets with his family to Aleppo during the Armenian Genocide. The archive had survived a century of displacement and the Syrian war.

That encounter changed the direction of her life and work. A first public telling of the story at the Center for Middle Eastern Studies later in 2019 grew into Azad Storytelling. A Harvard Artlab residency became the creative heart of AZAD (the rabbit and the wolf). The making of AZAD gave rise to a working method of contemplative storytelling the Hakawati Method, and to the next immersive work, Refuge(e), Illuminated.

Sona is the founder and creative director of Hakawati, a nonprofit based in the United States since 2018 and in Armenia since 2024, and the creator/founder of Modern Caravanserai. A practitioner of Vipassana meditation for a decade, she has sat extended silent retreats and studied with teachers including Sayadaw U Tejaniya and Jack Kornfield. Contemplative practice is not a subject added to her art; it is part of how the work sees.

Across performance, writing, research, and participation, Sona returns to one inquiry: How can story help us notice where our perception has narrowed, and make room for another understanding to emerge?