Sona Tatoyan is a Syrian-Armenian-American Actor, writer, cultural entrepreneur, and contemporary hakawati.

In 2019, Sona Tatoyan opened a trunk in the attic of her family’s home in war-torn Aleppo.

Inside were 180 hand-painted, century-old Karagöz shadow puppets belonging to her great-great-grandfather, Abkar Knadjian—a master puppeteer who carried them from Urfa to Aleppo when he fled the Armenian Genocide with his wife and seven children. The puppets are twice-over survivor objects, having endured both the genocide and, a century later, the Syrian war.

That discovery gave rise to a body of work built around a central realization: how we see determines how free we are. Sona approaches West Asian storytelling not merely as an ancient art form, but as a technology for expanding perception. Bringing the puppets into contemporary performance, she weaves personal narrative, ancestral history, irreverent comedy, music, and contemplative inquiry.

Her sold-out multimedia theater piece AZAD (the rabbit and the wolf) was hailed as “wondrous … shattering theater” by The San Francisco Chronicle and “expansive … visionary … virtuosic” by KQED, which named it among the Best Bay Area Theater of 2025.

Her work has been presented at the Pergamon Museum in Berlin, Harvard ArtLab, the MIT Museum, the University of Michigan, and the Mgrublian Center for Human Rights at Claremont McKenna College, among others.