Stories that change what we see
Sona creates keynotes and live storytelling experiences for universities, museums, cultural institutions, festivals, conferences, and communities. They don’t tell audiences what to think. They create the conditions for another way of seeing.
formats
Azad Storytelling: solo
45–50 minutes
Intimate, portable, and adaptable to theaters, lecture halls, museums, conference stages, and nontraditional spaces.
Azad Storytelling: with live oud
with live oud · Sona is joined by oud master Ara Dinkjian
Live music does not accompany the story from outside; it becomes a second storyteller, moving between play, rupture, menace, tenderness, and return.
Azad Storytelling: full live encounter
full live encounter
Sona, live oud, and live Karagöz puppetry. The puppets move from comic performers to witnesses and challengers, changing the authority of the storyteller and the audience’s relationship to what they are hearing.
signature keynote
How 180 Crazy Shadow Puppets Broke My Foot and Made Me See Clearly
How can contradiction make perception more spacious rather than more defended? Drawing on West Asian storytelling, Karagöz interruption, A Thousand and One Nights, and Vipassana practice, Sona shows how wonder and paradox can loosen certainty and make encounter across difference possible. Performed with live oud and Karagöz puppetry.
conversations, workshops, and residencies
Any format can be paired with a moderated conversation, artist talk, workshop, classroom visit, or longer residency. Topics include cultural memory, the Armenian and Syrian diasporas, storytelling and human rights, paradox as a creative method, contemplative practice, archive and inheritance, and the development of new performance forms.
selected engagements
Mgrublian Center for Human Rights, Claremont McKenna College
MIT Open Documentary Lab and MIT Museum: Quantum Healing: When Art, Tech & Resilience Meet, public conversation with Noubar Afeyan
University of Michigan: Haidostian Distinguished Lecture, Paradox and Liberation, and Azad Storytelling at the University of Michigan Museum of Art
Strassler Center for Holocaust and Genocide Studies, Clark University
Pergamon Museum Berlin, James Simon Galerie
UCLA
Harvard University Center for Middle Eastern Studies: Trauma, Magic, Love
Brandenburg Gate Foundation, Berlin: Storytelling as Spiritual Vehicle