Stories that
change how we see
Sona creates keynotes and live storytelling experiences for universities, museums, cultural institutions, festivals, conferences, and communities.
university of michigan Museum of Art – dr. Berj h. Haidostian Lecture · 2024
selected Past engagements
signature keynote
How 180 Crazy Shadow Puppets Broke My Foot and Made Me See Clearly
vineyard theater · december 2024
Most stories ask us to follow a plot. This one asks us to notice ourselves.
Fable, family memory, and comedy collide, and out of that collision Sona reveals the Scher/AZAD Method: a way of meeting contradiction without rushing to resolve it.
Audiences experience how wonder loosens certainty, how paradox makes room for discovery, and how a story can open up another response.
Bespoke experience designed for conferences, leadership gatherings, museums, universities, and communities asking how we move beyond fixed stories.
Fees are starting points for U.S. engagements. Travel, lodging, puppet freight and insurance, and technical production are quoted separately. International engagements and custom commissions by inquiry.
azad storytelling
One living story. Three ways to encounter it.
pico playhouse · los angeles · april 2022
“Poison siphoned through story emerges as medicine.” — Sona Tatoyan
180 hand-painted leather shadow puppets, made by Sona’s great-great-grandfather in the Ottoman Empire, carried into Syria through the Armenian Genocide, and recovered from Aleppo in 2019.
In every format, Sona turns that inheritance into a 45-minute journey through survival, exile, imagination, and the unruly power of story.
01
Solo Storytelling
Personal narrative and ancestral history turn a family archive into a living encounter with displacement, inheritance, laughter, and survival.
ideal for Universities, museums, conferences, and leadership gatherings.
02
Story and Live Oud
World-renowned Armenian-American oudist Ara Dinkjian joins Sona with a live score that becomes a second storyteller, carrying the audience across time and geography into memory, rupture, and repair.
ideal for Major conferences, arts presenters, cultural institutions, universities, and commemorations.
03
Story, Oud, and Centenarian Puppets
The fullest touring version brings Sona’s storytelling, Ara’s live oud, and the centenarian family puppets together. Animated by a touring puppeteer, the archive interrupts, questions, and transforms the story.
ideal for Flagship conferences, festivals, museums, theaters, and universities.
04
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.
Fees are starting points for U.S. engagements. Travel, lodging, puppet freight and insurance, and technical production are quoted separately. International engagements, residencies, facilitated conversations, and custom commissions by inquiry.