Guests: Chicago-based painter and visual artist Jackie Kazarian, and Armenian-Dutch biodesigner and artist Shushanik Droshakiryan.
In this episode, our guests explore how their art emerges from personal curiosities and lived experiences engaging with Armenian narratives, rather than representing a singular collective view. They reflect on how Armenian identity is a continuously reconstructed phenomenon that is shaped through their evolving relationships between art, homeland, and themselves across time and different mediums.
Biographies:
Jackie Kazarian is a Chicago-based visual artist working primarily in painting, installation and video. She received a BS in Zoology from Duke University and a MFA in Painting and Drawing from the School of the Art Institute of Chicago. She has held numerous solo exhibitions, including New York, Chicago, Miami, Spain, Syria and Kuwait. Her work is in many private and public collections, including Illinois State Museum, Rockford Art Museum, Metropolitan Pier and Exposition Authority, Chicago Public Library, and the United States Embassy, Armenia. In 2019, Jackie received the Lifetime Achievement Award from the Armenian Behavioral Science Association. She is a 2008 fellow of the Ellen Stone Belic Institute for the Study of Women & Gender in the Arts & Media at Columbia College Chicago and has served two tours as an art envoy for the U.S. State Department, presenting workshops, lectures and exhibitions in Kuwait and Syria. In 2015, Kazarian created a monumental painting to commemorate the 100-year anniversary of the Armenian genocide.
Shushanik Droshakiryan is an Armenian-Dutch biodesigner and artist based in Amsterdam. Her creative journey began with traditional Armenian carpet weaving at the National Centre for Aesthetics in Yerevan, where the material and ornamental logic of Armenian carpets formed her artistic thinking. Today, that foundation drives her biodesign practice in which Armenian cultural heritage is not preserved but activated as regenerative design intelligence. Her biomaterial systems do not merely reference Armenian identity — they are rooted in it, drawing from the logic of Armenian landscape,
material memory, and cultural form.
She is the founder of Venus in Fury, an Amsterdam-based biodesign lab, working at the intersection of material science, craft, and next-generation biomaterial systems. Her signature materials, SUF, a translucent seaweed-based bio-garment inspired by G.I. Gurdjieff, and ARTSAKH, a carbon-based bio-leather registered under EU trademark droshakiryan ®, each draw their identity from the Armenian land, memory, and heritage.
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