our mission

Our mission at the Armenian Needlelace Initiative is to engage the global network of Armenian needlelace practitioners, researchers, curators, collectors, and enthusiasts. Our goal is to help revitalize interest in what some consider an antiquated artistic practice by encouraging learning and making, building a warehouse of resources, fostering communication and community across scattered populations, and providing a forum for storytelling and creative cultural exchange. While this site is not a platform for political debate, we acknowledge the rising patterns of domination and are committed to the role traditional crafts can play as acts of resistance in cross-pollinating sovereignty movements worldwide.

As descendants of genocide survivors, we are grateful that our families found refuge in California—Elise’s family on Tongva and Chumash territories (Los Angeles) and Deborah’s family on Yokut territories (Fresno). Elise and Deborah now live on the unceded land of the Lisjan (Ohlone) peoples, located on the eastern shores of the San Francisco Bay. Given our own histories of familial displacement, we feel the impact of our lineages on the land and Indigenous peoples and work toward being in right relationship.

our vision

According to UNESCO, an important strategy in safeguarding intangible cultural heritage is for “artisans to continue to produce craft and to pass their skills and knowledge onto others, particularly within their own communities.” For many, reviving textile traditions is an act of reclamation. And the intimacy of face-to-face communication and hand-to-hand transfer of skill yields relational and embodied experiences. In our dispersed communities, this is not always possible. We offer this website as an alternative, with profound gratitude for our ancestors, families, and homelands, and the countless kindred spirits—artists, activists, teachers, scholars, curators, culture bearers, and cultural organizations around the world, both Armenian and non-Armenian—whose work informs, expertise guides, and vision inspires. 

Whatever our individual stories of dislocation and disorientation—exile from indigenous lands and severing of family ties, loss of language and unspoken histories of disaster, fragmented identity due to mixed bloodlines or discomfort with traditional gender roles—many of us have wished to feel welcomed as Armenians. Honoring Armenian needlelace is one way of seeking connection and reclaiming identity, of following the threads back to a sense of home.  Like those safeguarding traditional Western Armenian language, folk songs, and dances, we share a deep longing to inhabit the patterns of our foremothers.

a note on language

Language, like other cultural forms including threadwork, is a dynamic genre. Needlelace is commonly referred to in Western Armenian as ձեռագործ (tserakordz, “handwork”) or ասեղնագործ (aseghnakordz, “needlework”); the common Eastern Armenian term is ժանյակ (janyak, “lace”). Staying true to the tongue of our motherlines, in needlelace-centered discussions throughout this site we have chosen to name, translate, and transliterate Armenian words into English in accordance with their Western Armenian usage, unless otherwise noted.

Spoken by Ottoman Armenians and their descendants, Western Armenian has been a stateless language for over one hundred years and was designated as “definitely endangered” by UNESCO in 2010. Yet the Armenian language, alphabet, and other cultural forms have outlasted millennia of empires: Persian, Roman, Ottoman, and Russian. Over centuries of imperially enacted population separations, Western Armenian diverged from its classical Armenian roots and developed into its own language; its sister tongue, Eastern Armenian—the state language of today's Republic of Armenia—underwent significant changes during the Soviet era.

Like our language, Armenian populations continue to be in flux. In the wake of late nineteenth-century and early twentieth-century massacres that descended into full-scale genocide throughout historic Armenia, Anatolia, and Syria (present-day eastern Turkey, western Turkey, and parts of Syria, respectively), survivors fled across the world, and for decades the diasporic communities predominantly spoke Western Armenian. Notable diasporic language changes arose in the 1980s and have continued in war-spawned waves ever since, with surviving Eastern Armenian speakers joining and infusing communities with their own cultural forms.

Yet like our peoples, our sister languages have much more in common than the elements which seem to separate them. In contemporary references to the needlelace, increasingly we see the specific term for lace—ժանյակ (janyak, Eastern Armenian) or ժանեակ (janyag, Western Armenian)—being taken up by diasporans of diverse backgrounds, tugging on the threads which still connect us.

Deborah Valoma & Elise Youssoufian
Co-founders, Armenian Needlelace Initiative