Privilege on my ancestors’ backs

Celeste Nazeli Snowber, PhD is a dancer, writer and award-winning educator who is a professor in the Faculty of Education at Simon Fraser University, outside Vancouver, British Columbia, Canada. She has published widely and her books include Embodied Inquiry: Writing, living and being through the body, as well as two collections of poetry. Celeste creates site-specific performances in the natural world exploring ecology and the arts. Celeste is finishing a collection of poetry connected to her Armenian identity which will be accompanied by a one-woman show. Her mom immigrated to Boston right before the Genocide, and Celeste integrates poetry and dance as a way of excavating identity.

Boston based artist and MFA, Marsha Nouritza Odabashian’s drawings and paintings uniquely reflect the tension and expansiveness of being raised in dual cultures, Armenian and American. As a young child, she watched her mother cultivate the Armenian tradition of dyeing eggs red by boiling them in onion skins. In her work, vignettes of current events, history and social justice emerge from the onionskin dye on paper, stretched canvas or compressed cellulose sponge. Her numerous solo exhibitions in the US include Skins at the Armenian Museum of America in Watertown, In the Shade of the Peacock, EXPUNGE and Miasma at Galatea Fine Art in Boston. Group exhibitions include the Danforth Museum and Gallery Z. She has exhibited in Armenia twice: New Illuminations (HAYP Pop Up) and Road Maps (Honey Pump Gallery). Reviews of her work appear in ArtScope, Art New England, the Boston Globe, and the Mirror Spectator. Odabashian studies early and medieval Armenian art and architecture at Tufts University with Professor Christina Maranci, with whom she traveled to Aght’amar and Ani in Historic Armenia. Pairing her ancestral past with the present in her art is her means of fulfillment.