Collaborative media arts exhibition and anthology centering SWANA caregivers
United States
Los Angeles, California—Cazimi Studios is pleased to announce the six recipients of its Portals fellowship, a multi-year collaborative media arts project bringing together artists across disciplines to explore storytelling, care, and collective worldbuilding. The project will culminate in an exhibition launching in 2027.
Portals weaves together the speculative imaginaries of caregivers from the SWANA (Southwest Asia and North Africa) region and its global diasporas. Through film, sound, visual art, and writing, the project reclaims narrative space for caregivers as protagonists—agents of imagination, survival, and futurity.
The Portals 2026–28 Fellows are:
Morehshin Allahyari, Artist and Assistant Professor of Digital Media Art at Stanford University / Jude Chehab, Filmmaker / Gilda Davidian, Artist / Aroussiak Gabrielian, Designer, Scholar, and Media artist / Lara Sarkissian, Electronic Musician and Sound Artist / Oraib Toukan, Artist and Educator.
Working collaboratively over the next two years, the cohort will develop new works within a structure designed to resist extractive modes of cultural production. Fellows will receive financial support in the form of a 5,000 USD fellowship stipend and up to 5,000 USD in production funds. The Portals Fellowship is funded through support from Creative Capital and the Canada Council for the Arts.
Portals draws its title from “Queer Motherhood is Speculative Fiction,” a Pushcart Prize-nominated essay by Cazimi co-founder, Kamee Abrahamian. Building on this text, the fellowship serves as a platform for collectively theorizing caregiving as the prying open of portals: liminal entryways into lifeworlds radically different from those of the present.
Portals responds to calls by thinkers like Silvia Federici to “denounce the profound crisis of social reproduction that entire populations across the world are experiencing because of...the politics of extractivism and the now permanent state of warfare.” The project emerges as SWANA communities across the globe confront conditions of pervasive crisis and imperial violence, often through multi-generational recursions of dispossession, displacement, and diasporic dispersion. Grounding its process of shared inquiry within that context, Portals approaches caregiving not as an abstraction or nebulous slogan, but as a concrete tactic for countering systemic erasure.
At a moment when SWANA communities are encountering forms of unworlding, Portals centers the collective worldmaking performed by caregivers in the SWANA region and its global diasporas. The project recognizes practices of caregiving as a bulwark against the erosion of trans-generationally transmitted knowledge systems and communal infrastructures of survival. The project insists on care as both subject and methodology. It foregrounds interdependence over individual authorship, creating space for layered narratives in which grief, resistance, and possibility coexist.
“This fellowship convenes a collective space to attend to [care] with and through the SWANA community—across design, media, language, and other practices of world-making—and through the shared, largely invisible labor that sustains it.” —Aroussiak Gabrielian, 2026–28 Portals Fellow
Portals is developed by Cazimi Studios, a collaborative studio devoted to interdisciplinary storytelling and radical, care-centered creative production. The project is led by Co-Artistic Directors Kamee Abrahamian and Emily Mkrtichian, with Mashinka Firunts Hakopian serving as Curator and Director of Research, and Mara Tatevosian as Associate Curator.
Exhibition details will be announced in 2027.
About Cazimi Studios
A collaborative studio formed by Kamee Abrahamian and Emily Mkrtichian, devoted to creative production and interdisciplinary storytelling through visionary worldbuilding and radical archiving. We bring luminous spirits and a steadfast commitment to sustainable, community and care-centered practices into all the work that we make—along with our rugs, our jezveh, and our babies—honoring our ancestral lineages and diaspora antics.
