Sona Tatoyan

Actor | Writer

Sona Tatoyan is a Syrian-Armenian-American actor, writer, producer, and fifth-generation storyteller whose work transforms inherited trauma into creative power and cultural healing. She is the founder of Hakawati, a global NGO dedicated to turning memory into meaning and heritage into sanctuary.

Born to Syrian-Armenian immigrants in Baltimore and raised between the U.S. and Aleppo, Tatoyan grew up navigating the fractures of displacement, silence, and erasure. In 2019, on a return to war-scarred Aleppo, she rediscovered a trunk of 180 hand-painted leather Karagöz shadow puppets created and carried through genocide by her great-great-grandfather, Abkar Knadjian—a hakawati. The puppets—survivor objects, artistic technologies, and cross-cultural witnesses—collapsed time, lineage, and purpose. They revealed a truth that transformed her life: trauma and healing emerge from the same source when we learn to witness our stories with clarity and compassion. 

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 parallel path of deep meditation practice became the missing key to understanding how stories actually heal. On Vipassana retreat with Sayadaw U Tejaniya, Tatoyan experienced a realization that shaped her creative philosophy: healing begins with presence—meeting the story rather than escaping it. This insight converged with another breakthrough: a reframing of the 1001 Nights frame story as a universal blueprint for how narrative and awareness transform trauma. In Scheherazad’s healing of a traumatized king through storytelling, Tatoyan recognized a map for liberating perception and rehumanizing experience. These twin revelations—contemplative presence and narrative reframing—became the seed of Hakawati.

Hakawati’s early vision was supported and shaped 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. Even during his unjust imprisonment, he continued to advise and champion her work. His belief in cultural memory as civic responsibility and storytelling as a form of freedom remains woven into Hakawati’s ethical spine.

Azad Storytelling emerged as Tatoyan’s contemporary revival of the hakawati oral tradition—performed internationally, including at Berlin’s Pergamon Museum in 2023, the same week the indigenous Armenian enclave of Nagorno-Karabagh was ethnically cleansed. This work became the precursor to her signature creation, AZAD (the rabbit & the wolf), created in collaboration with director Jared Mezzocchi, two-time Obie Award-winning theater artist known for his pioneering work in multimedia performance. The production blends 120-year-old puppets, live oud performance with the renowned Ara Dinkjian, video/projection, contemplative practice and psychedelic insight. Developed at The Vineyard Theatre (with producer Bill Pullman), Harvard ArtLab, UConn’s Global Affairs Digital Media Residency, and Wake Forest University, AZAD premiered in 2025 with support from producer Noubar Afeyan to critical acclaim, hailed as “wondrous … shattering theater” by the San Francisco Chronicle.

Tatoyan’s speaking engagements and thought-leadership spans the Brandenburg Gate Foundation, Harvard CMES, MIT, UCLA, and the University of Michigan (Distinguished Haidostian Lecture), where she addresses cultural memory, trauma, contemplative practice, and the liberatory power of reframing story. She has served on the World Cinema Jury at the Duhok International Film Festival (Kurdistan) and as the Rudolf Arnheim Guest Artist Professor at Humboldt University (Berlin), and is a 2024–26 Georgetown Global Politics and Performance Lab Fellow.

A graduate of Wake Forest University, Tatoyan studied under—and was personally mentored by—Dr. Maya Angelou, whose influence continues to shape her artistic, ethical, and spiritual framework. As an actor she trained at the William Esper Studio with Bill Esper, holds a second-degree black belt in Tae Kwon Do, and completed yoga teacher training in Goa, India.

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