Ella Kanegarian
Cultural Advisor
Email: ella@yerevanbiennial.org
Ella Kanegarian was born in 1989 in Armenia, is a mixture of Greek, eastern, and western Armenians. First time got published at the age of nine in “Garun” literary magazine. Studied art history and theory in Yerevan State Academy of Fine Arts, later moving towards marketing and advertising. Worked as a senior-editor in local educational marketing Magazine for three years and later re-qualified herself as a commercial script writer and copywriter, simultaneously freelancing as an art critic. Her first work as a curator was a typographic exhibition of an Amsterdam based artist Gayane Yerkanyan in 2016. Her second exhibition, curated the same year of works by Ashot Avagyan, was the first Armenian exhibition to feature both paintings and artworks created from war artifacts. Later she curated several more exhibitions of different emerging and established artists, some of these exhibitions were political in nature. She is the first local journalist to be featured in the 400th anniversary edition of the British music magazine “The Wire” with her essay on the contemporary electronic music scene of Armenia. Since 2019 Ella has switched to writing and playwriting. Her first play “Imagined on True Events” has won the special jury recognition in 2020 in frames of EURODRAM, EURODRAM – European network for drama in translation. Currently collaborates with Ukrainian-American duo SAMUUM as a lyricist and works on her third play “m_OTHER_LAND ” , which is about undigested cultural conflicts and Armenian-Turkish issues in the era of post-nationalism. Her main topics of interest are nostalgic and communication with the past.