Aylin Vartanyan Dilaver

Aylin Vartanyan Dilaver is an educator and researcher based in Istanbul whose work explores the transformative potential of the arts within processes of learning, memory, and aesthetic inquiry. She studied political economy and literature at Barnard College and Columbia University, and taught critical reading and writing for many years at Boğaziçi University, where she was also among the founding members of the Peace Education Application and Research Center.

Her encounter with Augusto Boal’s Theatre of the Oppressed in 2005 marked a shift toward understanding art as a language of social engagement and collective expression. She completed her doctoral studies at the European Graduate School, where her research examined the experiences of silence and re-membering among Armenian women in Istanbul through digital storytelling and postmemory, situating these within feminist and decolonial approaches to memory, voice, and lived experience.

Since 2011, she has been facilitating arts-based workshops, creating spaces in which participants engage their lived experience through artistic processes and embodied forms of knowing. She currently teaches at the Expressive Arts Institiute based in Istanbul and develops art-based learning environments within and beyond academic contexts.

Her writing brings together personal memory, collective witnessing, and expressive arts-based research. She is a founding member of the Parrhesia Collective (https://www.parrhesiacollective.com), a group of Armenian women academics and artists. As part of this collective she contributes to a weekly newspaper AGOS based in Istanbul (https://www.parrhesiacollective.com/authors/aylin-vartanyan) and runs a podcast called “This is No Ordinary Life”, with one of the founding members Talin Suciyan. In this podcast series they explore the silencing strategies and spaces of resistance that Armenian women encounter in the flow of everyday life. (https://open.spotify.com/show/6sRjC3WGPJKU3KAU284Pvp?si=b31901ee9b2b46c6)