Ani Kazandjian (she/they)
Artist, Actor, Producer
Rooted in a foundation of conservatory-trained stage acting, my art-making practice has evolved into a multidisciplinary exploration of performance, installation, sculpture, and projection-based work using found footage and original film. My work is deeply intuitive and often emerges from a felt sense rather than a conceptual plan—led by the body, memory, and inherited history.
Central to my practice is the theme of Home—a word I return to again and again, asking it to reveal itself in new forms. My work does not seek to define home, but to question, fragment, and reimagine it. In Historias Del Embargo, I explored the impact of the JFK-era embargo on Cuban citizens and how an act of foreign policy ruptured not only access to goods and resources, but one’s psychological and emotional sense of belonging. The installation-performance became a site of displacement and endurance, a reflection on how home can be both taken and recreated.
Currently, I am developing a performance series titled This Is Not My Home, in which I investigate what it means to be a first-generation Syrian Armenian in America. The work traces my layered relationships to Syria—where I spent my childhood summers surrounded by family and deep cultural immersion—and Armenia, the homeland tied to my bloodline and ancestral memory. This project contends with inherited displacement, longing, diaspora, and the ways in which language, gesture, and ritual offer alternative architectures of home.
Whether I am working with physical materials or ephemeral gestures, my aim is to hold space for contradiction: home as both absence and presence, body as both archive and altar.
