SEVAN is award-winning actor-playwright whose work has been produced/developed in London and New York. 2023 EST/Sloan Commission. 2022 PWC Core Writer. 2022 New Arab American Theatre. 2021 NAMT 33rd Festival of New Musicals; 2021 Orchard Project Performance Lab; 2020 Theatre Row Kitchen Sink Residency; 2018 PlayPenn Conference; 2018 Pipeline Theatre Lab; Bush Theatre inaugural 2015 Emerging Writers Group; The Public Theater 2011 Emerging Writers Group; NYTW Usual Suspect; Rising Circle Theatre Collective 2010 InkTANK Writer's Lab; 2016 Kondazian Playwriting Award for Armenian Stories. 2016 Arch and Bruce Foundation Playwriting Prize.
ARTIST STATEMENT:
I was raised in a Christian and Muslim household by a Lebanese-Armenian mother and a Pakistani-Indian father. My entire core family are survivors and inheritors of The Armenian Genocide, The 1947 Partition, and The Lebanese Civil War. I am also a survivor of a war which is how I ended up in America.
I write work that builds bridges between cultures, communities, and countries in an effort to expand awareness and understanding beyond the stereotypes and archetypes we’ve come to know about one another. Sometimes that means criticising the Dominant Culture, sometimes that means criticising Sub-Cultures, and sometimes that means celebrating both.
My recent area of interest is in cross-cultural and religious identities trying to exist in monocultures in both refugee and native narratives. These ideas come out of my status as a 1.5 generation child who is neither fully in the East nor fully in the West.
I am dedicated to subverting and dismantling one-story culture narratives that have been created by the Dominant Culture. My role is not to deny or erase those narratives but to create a more pluralistic view of my cultures and communities. I want to break people's perceptions of what and who they think my people are.
SEVAN
He/Him/His
