Sona creates live encounters in which story is not simply delivered to an audience. It interrupts, contradicts, implicates, and changes the person telling it.

After returning to her family’s home in Aleppo during the Syrian war, Sona discovers a trunk of shadow puppets made by her great-great-grandfather more than a century earlier. The puppets refuse to remain artifacts. They interrupt her account, expose what she has failed to understand, and pull her through family testimony, Armenian history, A Thousand and One Nights, the ongoing imprisonment of her friend Osman Kavala, and her own buried story.

A live, kaleidoscopic journey through rupture, survival, and the stories we inherit. Sona weaves the rediscovery of the family puppets with Armenian family history, Karagöz comedy, A Thousand and One Nights, the question of how trauma is transmitted and healed, and how a story can be encountered differently. It is the foundational work from which AZAD (the rabbit and the wolf) grew.

Refuge(e), Illuminated expands the formal discovery of AZAD: the archive does not simply illustrate a story; it acts upon the person encountering it.

The project reframes the refugee not only as someone seeking refuge, but as a carrier and creator of refuge through memory, humor, craft, story, and imagination.

Member, Actors’ Equity Association. Selected credits: world premieres of José Rivera’s Brainpeople (American Conservatory Theater), Massacre (Sing to Your Children) (The Goodman Theatre), and Boleros for the Disenchanted (Yale Repertory Theatre), for which she received a 2009 Connecticut Critics Circle Acting Award. Starred in The Journey, the first American independent feature shot in Armenia, Audience Award at the 2002 Milan International Film Festival.

Training: William Esper Studio with Bill Esper, Sanford Meisner Technique. BA in Theatre, Wake Forest University, Caroline Award for Excellence in Acting.