April 24, 2023

Mizna Appoints Ellina Kevorkian as Deputy Director

by Lamia Abukhadra | in Mizna News

KEVORKIAN’S EXTENSIVE EXPERIENCE COMES AT A PERIOD OF CRITICAL ORGANIZATIONAL GROWTH AT MIZNA

Mizna is pleased to announce the appointment of Ellina Kevorkian to the position of Deputy Director, following an international search. Kevorkian recently served as Franconia Sculpture Park’s Director of Artist Residency Programs and previously as the Artistic Director for Artist Residency Programs at Bemis Center for Contemporary Arts. Kevorkian brings her administrative expertise to Mizna at a vital moment of growing organizational capacity made possible in part by a multi-year Regional Cultural Treasure Award from the McKnight Foundation, part of the Ford Foundation’s America’s Cultural Treasures initiative. As Deputy Director, Kevorkian will be an organizational leader, working to optimize organizational and programming operations at Mizna while serving as a thought partner to the Executive and Artistic Director, Lana Salah Barkawi. 

“I couldn’t be more honored to join such a respected organization with a far-reaching impact on so many creative communities—Mizna is a one-of-a-kind cultural arts organization doing important work in promoting contemporary SWANA voices. I’m looking forward to continuing my mission of supporting creative expression and increasing SWANA’s presence in the arts.” —Ellina Kevorkian 

“Ellina Kevorkian brings to Mizna deep, dynamic experience in the arts sector as well as an incredible enthusiasm and support for art, ideas, and artists themselves. As Mizna approaches its twenty-fifth anniversary next year, the addition of a seasoned leader to the team represents an exciting moment of growth and possibility that helps secure our future and our ability to be a sustained space for SWANA artists. As an Armenian American, Ellina’s joining also highlights Mizna’s commitment to an expansive SWANA community.” —Lana Salah Barkawi

About Ellina Kevorkian

Ellina Kevorkian is an Armenian American artist, curator, and director of artist residency programs with a twenty-year career advocating for art and artists informed by her experience in interdisciplinary and contemporary visual arts and performance. Since becoming an artist residency director, she’s been at the fore of envisioning artist residencies as they evolve to professionalize along with new generations of artists while advocating for artist care and sustainability. Kevorkian is recognized nationally for organizing forward-thinking residencies as new curatorial platforms, working with emerging to mid-career artists in multiple disciplines such as visual arts, performance, writing, social practice, and experimental sound. Her thematic residencies centered social justice concerns bringing like-minded cohorts together for topics such as Sci-Fi & the Human Condition, Art, Empathy & Ethos, and Authority & Visibility in Public Space.

Before her time as a residency director, Kevorkian’s curatorial practice spanned experimental works and mediums investigating human vulnerability and self-interrogation. Her exhibition for the Getty Museum’s Pacific Standard Time Initiative, Recollecting Performance, was widely regarded as one of the first exhibitions examining costumes and garments worn by conceptual performance artists. Commissioned artists like Senga Nengudi, Eleanor Antin, Suzanne Lacy, Barbara T. Smith, Ed Bereal, and Paul McCarthy recorded memories of their 1970s and early 80s performances alongside what they wore using memory to recall the performance and to contextualize the pressing issues of the times. 

As an artist, Kevorkian has participated in solo and group exhibitions, showing work at Western Project, Mark Moore Gallery, the Museum of Contemporary Art Los Angeles, the Museum of Contemporary Art Denver, The Center for the Art of Performance at the University of California Los Angeles, as well as having been included in the Southern California Council of the National Museum of Women in the Arts–sponsored retrospective Multiple Vantage Points: Southern California Women Artists, 1980–2006. Her work has been written about in the LA Times, the LA Weekly, ArtForum, ArtPulse, and Artnet, and was written about by Sunjata Iyengar in Rethinking Feminism in Early Modern Studies—Gender, Race, and Sexuality, published by Routledge Press.

Kevorkian has been a guest of universities, conferences, and convenings, participating in nationwide discourse and panel reviews for significant institutions such as The National Endowment for the Arts, The Pew Center for Cultural Heritage, Creative Capital Foundation, 

The Harpo Foundation, The Alliance for Artist Communities, as well as College Art Association . She was named a Portland Emerging Arts Leader affiliated with the Emerging Leaders Network, a program of Americans for the Arts, and a Mayor-appointed Arts Commissioner for the City of Minneapolis. She holds an MFA from Claremont Graduate University and an MA in curatorial practice in performance from Wesleyan University. 

About Mizna

Mizna is a critical platform for contemporary literature, film, art, and cultural production centering the work of Arab and Southwest Asian, and North African (SWANA) artists. For more than twenty years, Mizna has been creating a decolonized cultural space to reflect the expansiveness of our community and to foster exchange, examine ideas, and engage audiences in meaningful art.
Named City Page’s Nonprofit of the Year in 2020 and a Regional Cultural Treasure in 2021, we publish Mizna, an award-winning SWANA lit and art journal; produce the Twin Cities Arab Film Festival, the largest and longest-running Arab film fest in the Midwest; and offer classes, readings, performances, public art, and community events, having featured over 400 local and global writers, filmmakers, and artists.