Armand Yervant Tufenkian is an Armenian-American filmmaker, born in 1988 to parents from Aleppo, Syria.
His films include Accession (2018), which maps an informal network of letter correspondence about the exchange of seeds. It has screened at festivals such as the Viennale, Art of the Real at Lincoln Center, Mar del Plata, Underdox, and as part of the 'Reimagining the Land' retrospective at Sheffield Doc/Fest and the 'Conscious Landscapes' exhibition at the Museum of Contemporary Art in Skopje, among others.
Previous films include in lightning Agnes (2014), made at an elevation of ten thousand feet in the Zirkel Wilderness of Colorado and featured in the Millennium Film Journal and Kathryn Ramey’s book Experimental Filmmaking.
Tufenkian's work has been supported recently by residencies at Fogo Island Arts, Djerassi Resident Artists Program, and Monson Arts, and previously through grants from the Virginia Foundation for the Humanities, Puffin Foundation, the City of Chicago's Individual Artist Program, and the Creative Armenia Foundation.
He did undergraduate studies at Colby College, doctoral studies at Duke University, and studied film and fine arts at the California Institute of the Arts.
He works as a fire lookout in the Sequoia forest of the Sierra Nevada and teaches in the Visual Arts department at the University of California, San Diego.
In the Manner of Smoke, a long-form observation of disparate perspectives
on forest fires, will be his next film.
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Recent Screenings and Exhibitions
Accession
Bienal Ciudad y Ciencia | February 2023
Braunschweig University of Art | November 2020
Reimagining the Land retrospective at Sheffield Doc/Fest | Aug-Sep 2020
Mimesis Documentary Festival | August 2020
Our Habitats Programme | May 2020
Daimon Muestra Internacional de Cine | April 2020
UnionDocs | February 2020
Museum of Contemporary Art Skopje | December 2019
Pravo Ljudski Sarajevo | December 2019
Viennale | October 2019
Art of the Real at Lincoln Center | April 2019
Mar del Plata | November 2018
Underdox | October 2018
Temporary Fields
Lithium Gallery | November 2018
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Contact
armandtufenkian [at] gmail
Recent Press
Lucía Salas and Christopher Small. #3 Reimagining the Land. We Can't Go Home Again (podcast). 2020
Lauren Wagner. Thought provoking cinema. Viennale Hören (podcast). 2019
David Perrin. "Art of the Real 2019." MUBI Notebook. 2019
Jacob Zicheng Zhang. "An Archival Impulse, or Not: Accessioning." gallery no one. 2019
Dustin Chang. "Art of the Real: A Celebration of Non-Narrative Filmmaking." ScreenAnarchy. 2019
Lucía Salas. "Semillas del pasado/Seeds from the Past." Mar del Plata International Film Festival. 2018
Neil Young. "Far from the shallow now: two highlights from Underdox." Modern Times Review. 2018