Kohar Avakian

Kohar Avakian is a Native, Black, and Armenian artist, visual storyteller, and scholar from Worcester, Massachusetts, the ancestral land of her tribe, the Nipmuc Nation, and home to one of the oldest Armenian communities in the U.S. She holds a B.A. in History, modified with Native American Studies, from Dartmouth College and is currently pursuing her Ph.D. in American Studies at Yale. As a descendant of genocide survivors still awaiting reparations, she has experienced the unparalleled power of learning about other peoples’ histories through their own eyes. Adding vibrancy and color to her life as a graduate student, photography, oral history interviews, and multi-media art (digital collage, drawing, ceramics) have provided her an outlet to explore the intersection of race, reparations, memory, and kinship in the 21st century.