Armen Ohanian

Biography Early life in the Caucasus Armen Ohanian was born in Shamakha, then part of the Russian Empire (now in Azerbaijan) to an upper-class Armenian family, in 1888.

A devastating earthquake in 1902 destroyed her home and forced her family to move to Baku. Ohanian found the transition from the "flowering" Shamakha to the "black, oily" Baku difficult. She was enrolled in a Russian school, an institution she described as a "nightmare" that sought to strip Armenian children of their native identity and language.

Artistic awakening in Persia Following her separation, she moved to Persia (modern-day Iran), settling first in Resht and then Tehran. She began her acting career as Sophia Ter-Ohanian in 1906, but it was in Persia that she fully developed her identity as a dancer. She found refuge among a group of Muslim women who taught her the traditional "Oriental" dances of the region. She performed extensively in London, Paris, Brussels, Milan, and the United States. While she was hailed as a "great artist" by contemporaries like Anatole France, modern critics often note that her work navigated a complex line between cultural innovation and catering to orientalist fetishes.

She married her second husband, Mexican economist Makedonio Garza, in 1922. The couple eventually settled in Mexico in 1934. In modern scholarship, Ohanian's adoption of a masculine-gendered name and her public subversion of traditional Armenian gender roles have led researchers to describe her as genderqueer.

Bakhchinyan, Artsvi, and Matiossian, Vartan, Շամախեցի պարուհին (The Dancer of Shamakha), Yerevan, 2007. Matiossian, Vartan and Bakhchinyan, Artsvi, A Woman of the World: Armen Ohanian, the 'Dancer of Shamakha', Fresno, The Press at California State University, 2022.