Sona Tatoyan

Founder | Creative Director

Sona Tatoyan is a Syrian-Armenian-American theater and film artist, hakawati, and contemplative practitioner. She is the founder and creative director of Hakawati, a cultural research and storytelling organization grounded in a single conviction: perception is trainable, and story is the technology that trains it.

Born to Syrian-Armenian immigrants in Baltimore and raised between the United States and Aleppo, Tatoyan grew up navigating the fractures of displacement, silence, and erasure. In 2019, she found 180 hand-painted leather Karagöz shadow puppets in her family’s abandoned Aleppo home, made and carried through the Armenian Genocide by her great-great-grandfather, Abkar Knadjian, a hakawati. In that moment, her perception of her inheritance expanded. What she had understood as trauma alone revealed a second face: a living storytelling lineage. She came to see that her inheritance held both the wound and the wisdom, and that realization marked the beginning of what she describes as a collaboration across time with her ancestor. The full canon of 180 puppets, the Abkar Knadjian Collection, has since been digitized; field research and scholarship form the next phase of the archive’s life.

Tatoyan’s career spans more than two decades across theater, film, immersive media, and performance. As an actress, she originated roles in world premieres at Yale Repertory Theatre, The Goodman Theatre, and American Conservatory Theater, and starred in The Journey, the first American independent film shot in Armenia (Audience Award, Milan Film Festival). As a screenwriter, her debut feature The First Full Moon was selected for the 2011 Sundance/RAWI Screenwriters Lab and the Dubai Film Connection.

A decade of Vipassana practice reshaped Tatoyan’s understanding of how stories actually heal. Working with teachers including Sayadaw U Tejaniya and Jack Kornfield, Tatoyan realized that healing begins with presence: meeting the story rather than escaping it. This converged with the insight that the frame story of the One Thousand and One Nights is a universal map for transforming trauma. Together, these revelations became the foundation of the contemplative storytelling practice at the center of everything Hakawati builds. The practice emerged directly from Tatoyan’s own lived experience, making her its first proof of concept.

Hakawati’s early vision was supported by Turkish cultural patron and human rights advocate Osman Kavala, who championed Tatoyan’s cross-border field research and mentored her understanding of storytelling as civic courage. His belief in cultural memory as civic responsibility remains woven into the organization’s ethical foundation.

Azad Storytelling, Tatoyan’s contemporary revival of the hakawati oral tradition, has been performed internationally, including at Berlin’s Pergamon Museum, the University of Michigan, and Claremont McKenna College’s Mgrublian Center for Human Rights. It became the artistic foundation for her signature theatrical work, AZAD (the rabbit and the wolf), created with director Jared Mezzocchi, a two-time Obie Award-winning pioneer of multimedia performance. Blending the century-old Karagöz puppets, live oud performance by Ara Dinkjian, projection design, and contemplative practice, AZAD was developed at The Vineyard Theatre, Harvard ArtLab, UConn’s Global Affairs Digital Media Residency, and Wake Forest University. It premiered in San Francisco in spring 2025, with Noubar Afeyan as executive producer. The production received the San Francisco Chronicle’s highest rating and recognition among KQED’s Best Bay Area Theater of 2025. It now moves toward an Off-Broadway premiere targeted for fall 2027.

Through Hakawati, Tatoyan stewards the Karagöz archive, public programs, exhibitions, and a research program, in active development, into how story expands human perception. Her current creative work includes Quantum Mischief, a micro-comedy Karagöz puppet series directed by Jared Mezzocchi, a memoir, and the feature documentary My Great-Great-Grandfather’s Puppets, directed by Sareen Hairabedian.

Tatoyan’s speaking engagements include the Brandenburg Gate Foundation, Harvard CMES, the MIT Museum, UCLA, and the University of Michigan’s Dr. Berj H. Haidostian Distinguished Lecture. She served on the World Cinema Jury at the Duhok International Film Festival, was Rudolf Arnheim Guest Artist Professor at Humboldt University in Berlin, and is a 2024–26 Fellow of Georgetown University’s Laboratory for Global Performance and Politics. She trained as an actor at the William Esper Studio with Bill Esper, and is a graduate of Wake Forest University, where she was personally mentored by Dr. Maya Angelou.

Operating between Aleppo, Yerevan, and Los Angeles, Tatoyan leads a lineage-rooted, globally resonant cultural organization that asks one essential question: What becomes possible when we witness both the light and the shadow of our stories, and one another, with compassion and imagination?