Father: A Photographic Journey by Diana Markosian

About the Exhibition

The Armenian Museum of America is proud to present Father, a deeply personal and visually compelling project by internationally acclaimed artist Diana Markosian. This exhibition marks the U.S. debut of the work, offering an intimate exploration of family, memory, and identity.

When she was seven, Diana Markosian immigrated to the United States with her mother and brother,  leaving her father behind. Fifteen years later, Markosian traveled to Armenia in search of him—a man who had become a stranger. Father traces this emotional journey to rediscover and rebuild a lost relationship, unfolding through photography, archival materials, video, and text.

Through this multidisciplinary body of work, Markosian reflects on themes of displacement, loss, and belonging, creating a poignant narrative that resonates across generations and diasporic experiences.

“By placing her own journey alongside her father’s parallel, unseen search, Markosian reveals how identity is shaped as much by loss and distance as by presence and reunion. Father offers a powerful meditation on the complexities of family and the enduring search for connection, inviting audiences to reflect on their own histories and relationships,” states Curator Anahit Gasparyan.

The exhibition is curated by Anahit Gasparyan and co-produced by Les Rencontres d’Arles and Foam, Amsterdam. 

Generously supported by the JHM Charitable Foundation.

About the Artist, Diana Markosian

Diana Markosian (b. 1989, Moscow) is an American artist of Armenian descent working across photography, film, and installation. Her practice interrogates the unstable terrain of memory, displacement, and the construction of personal and collective histories, drawing on her own biography as both subject and methodological framework. Working between documentary and staged image-making, Markosian investigates themes of absence, longing, and the reconstruction of the past.

Across her projects, loss emerges as a generative condition, shaping narratives that revisit formative ruptures and the fragile architectures of belonging. In Santa Barbara (2020), she reflects on migration and the fragmentation of home through the lens of her family’s relocation to the United States. In Father (2024), Markosian turns toward the possibility of repair, tracing an attempt at reconnection with her estranged father after decades of absence. With her latest body of work, Replaced (2026), this investigation extends into the terrain of romantic intimacy, examining the vulnerability of grounding identity in a shared future and the disorientation that emerges when that imagined future dissolves.

Markosian’s work has been exhibited at leading international institutions, including the San Francisco Museum of Modern Art, the National Portrait Gallery, the International Center of Photography, and Foam Fotografiemuseum Amsterdam. In 2025, she was awarded the Madame Figaro Prize at the Rencontres d’Arles for her exhibition Father. Her work is held in prominent public and private collections, and she is widely recognized for advancing a nuanced dialogue between documentary practice and staged narrative within contemporary art.

About the Curator, Anahit Gasparyan

Anahit Gasparyan’s curatorial and scholarly practices engage Armenian art across historical and contemporary contexts, with a focus on how narratives of memory, identity, and displacement are constructed through visual culture. She holds an MA from the History of Art and Architecture Department from Tufts University, where she specialized in medieval Armenian and Byzantine art, with research on manuscript illumination and its relationship to architectural space.  Gasparyan’s previous experience includes roles at the Getty Research Institute and the MassArt Art Museum.