performance
Sona creates live encounters in which story is not simply delivered to an audience. It interrupts, contradicts, implicates—and changes the relationship between storyteller and listener.
multimedia theater
AZAD (the rabbit and the wolf)
production photograph · potrero stage
azad trailer · vimeo
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.
AZAD received its sold-out world premiere at San Francisco’s Potrero Stage from April 11 through May 3, 2025, co-produced by Hakawati and Golden Thread Productions.
Following its critically acclaimed premiere, the work is being developed for its next major production.
live storytelling experience
Azad Storytelling
University of Michigan Keene theater September 2024 – The MICHIGAN DAILY
A live, kaleidoscopic journey through rupture, survival, and the stories we inherit.
Sona weaves the rediscovery of her family’s 180 shadow puppets with Armenian family history, Karagöz comedy, A Thousand and One Nights, and the question of how trauma is transmitted—and whether story can change our relationship to what we inherit.
Azad Storytelling is the foundational work from which AZAD (the rabbit and the wolf) grew.
immersive performance-installation in development
Refuge(e), Illuminated
Discovery of Puppet Trunk – Sona Tatoyan – Aleppo 2019
Refuge(e), Illuminated is an immersive performance-installation that travels from the Silk Road city of Urfa to Aleppo during the Armenian Genocide, through the Syrian war and the rediscovery of the puppets, and toward deep time at Göbekli Tepe.
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.
The original puppets do not simply illustrate the story. They act upon the people encountering them.
Multi Sensory Experience · co-creator
1001 Nights: A Celebration of West Asian Music, Movement, and Story
Immersive experience bringing musicians, dancers, storytellers, and audiences into a contemporary caravanserai inspired by A Thousand and One Nights.
Co-created by Sona Tatoyan, the festival has been presented in Glendale and Highland Park, California, and in Yerevan, Armenia.
selected earlier performance
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.