Azad Storytelling: Shadow, Scherazad, and the Alchemy of Healing
Sona Tatoyan
Sona Tatoyan is a Syrian-Armenian-American actor, writer, producer, fifth-generation storyteller, and the founder of Hakawati, a cultural organization exploring how narrative can transform trauma, perception, and civic imagination. Born to Syrian-Armenian immigrants and raised between the U.S. and Aleppo, her life changed in 2019 when she discovered a trunk of 180 hand-painted Karagöz shadow puppets created and carried through genocide by her great-great-grandfather, a hakawati (oral storyteller). The puppets—survivor objects and cross-cultural witnesses—collapsed lineage, history, and purpose, revealing a central insight that guides her work: that how we meet a story determines whether it calcifies into trauma or becomes a source of understanding and repair.
Tatoyan’s career spans theater, film, immersive media, and thought leadership. She has originated roles at Yale Repertory Theatre, The Goodman Theatre, and A.C.T., and her screenwriting work has been supported by the Sundance Institute and the Dubai Film Connection. Her signature theatrical work, AZAD (the rabbit & the wolf) premiered in 2025 to extraordinary acclaim and hailed by the San Francisco Chronicle as “wondrous” and “shattering.”
A 2024–26 Georgetown Global Politics and Performance Lab Fellow, Tatoyan draws on a decade-long Vipassana meditation practice and a reframing of The 1001 Nights as a universal healing blueprint. Her work has been presented at Harvard, MIT, UCLA, the Brandenburg Gate Foundation, and beyond. Operating between Aleppo, Yerevan, and Los Angeles, she leads Hakawati as a lineage-rooted, globally resonant inquiry into how narrative can counter polarization and restore our capacity to see one another clearly.
Ms. Tatoyan’s Athenaeum program is the 2025-26 Mgrublian Annual Lecture on Armenian Studies and is co-sponsored by the Mgrublian Center for Human Rights at Claremont McKenna College.