The Lab Community

Sonya Armaghanyan was born in Yerevan, Armenia. Despite an early childhood influenced by regional instability and war, Sonya’s parents introduced her and her brother to a world that stretched far beyond the borders of Armenia through literature, music, circus, and theatre. For Sonya, theatre became a place of magic and deep emotions. She experienced how the creative process of theatre reveals and reimagines one’s identity, sense of belonging, feelings, and perceptions individually, and in relation to others. These notions are deeply rooted in Sonya’s work as a cultural producer, theatre practitioner, and community engagement specialist. Her artistic practice focuses on creating spaces of encounter between the individual and the collective, and where a shared collective dreaming becomes possible. In her work Sonya sees and listens to stories of people who experience destruction and loss and believes that in a time of crisis, there is a need for kindness, hope, empathy, and humanizing ‘the other.’ Sonya is a producer and facilitator of numerous performative workshops and projects in Armenia, Nepal, Switzerland, Greece, and Kenya. She currently works with the International Organization for Migration, where she uses art-based approaches for social reintegration and psychosocial wellbeing of persons affected by conflict in Somalia. She is the recipient of the Swiss Humanitarian Award 2018 for her research paper “Theatre as Psychosocial Approach in Humanitarian Settings.” Sonya is in love with love and believes that it is the stories of each one of us that collide and create our Universe.