Azad Storytelling is a live storytelling performance by Syrian-Armenian-American artist Sona Tatoyan—an intimate, multi-generational healing journey that travels from the Armenian Genocide to the Syrian war, interweaving personal narrative, ancestral history, and indigenous Middle Eastern music. A century after her great-great-grandfather Abkar Knadjian salvaged his family and his art from the Armenian Genocide, Tatoyan unearths a trunk in the attic of her family home in war-torn Aleppo, filled with his handmade Karagöz shadow puppets and ancient magic tricks—an encounter that leads her into the world of 1001 Nights and Scheherazade, and toward a deeper inquiry into how trauma transpires and how it is healed through story. “Azad,” meaning “free” in Armenian, Farsi, and Kurdish, gestures toward the work’s central inquiry: what freedom might mean in the aftermath of rupture. The performance is followed by a curated audience conversation, inviting reflection and dialogue around memory, perception, and the role of storytelling in times of rupture and repair.

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 rediscovered 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)—created with two time Obie-winning multimedia theater pioneer Jared Mezzocchi, produced by Bill Pullman and supported by executive producer Noubar Afeyan—premiered in 2025 to extraordinary acclaim, named one of KQED’s Best Theater Productions of the Year 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.