SEVAN's work has been seen in London and New York at The Public Theatre, New York Theatre Workshop, The Flea Theatre, The Sheen Center, The Bush Theatre, Theatre Royal Stratford East, Theatre503, Rich Mix, The Old Red Lion, The Space, and Access Theatre. Member: 2021 NAMT 33rd Festival of New Musicals;  2021 Orchard Project Performance Lab; 2020 Theatre Row Kitchen Sink Residency.; 2018 Pipeline Theatre Lab; Bush Theatre inaugural 2015 Emerging Writers Group; The Public Theater 2011 Emerging Writers Group; NYTW Usual Suspect; Rising Circle Theatre Collective 2010 InkTANK Writer's Lab; 2016 Kondazian Playwriting Award for Armenian Stories. 2016 Arch and Bruce Foundation Playwriting Prize.

ARTIST STATEMENT:

I was raised in a Christian and Muslim household by a Lebanese-Armenian mother and a Pakistani father. My entire core family are survivors and inheritors of three of the worst cultural moments in history: The Armenian Genocide, The 1947 Partition, The Lebanese Civil War. I am also a survivor of a war which is how I ended up in America.

My work tends to straddle two themes:

• Subverting typical narratives (created and supported by the media's Theatre of Terrorism) of South Asian/Middle Eastern/Muslim/Arab with stories that are all too real but often ignored.
• Dismantling American Mythologies of 'greatness’.

Sometimes the two themes intersect. I reveal risky truths by re-familiarizing the familiar through the unfamiliar. I examine how truth and untruth, reality and falsehood, reason and unreason battle it out in an effort to build bridges between communities and countries.

These narratives come out of my status as a 1.5 generation child who is neither fully in the East nor fully in the West but who has carried all the ideals and cultural mores of the East while being fully enculturated in the West. I am a prime example of what it means to live on a cultural hyphen. 

I am dedicated to completely and utterly subverting and dismantling one-story culturism that has been created by the Dominant Culture. The media, in all its forms, is responsible for creating to many social and racial problematics by continuing to rehash tropes and stories that have limited Other Cultures, and, at worse, ignore them completely. And when people only see these narratives the begin to see them as the only truth; and this applies to White and Minority communities. I've seen these same narratives shape my family's perception of other minorities and the greatness of America. My role is not to deny or erase those narratives but to create a more pluralistic view of my cultures and communities. I want to break people's perceptions of what they think my people are.