elise youssoufian
About

About

Photo of Elise Youssoufian Above: Elise in Musa Dagh (2019)

A new year, new moon poem (2024):

bliss of gravity
falling back to let Earth catch
you and me, safe, free

CURRENT OFFERINGS

Virtual Consultations and Therapeutic Music Sessions:

SCHEDULE TIME WITH ELISE HERE

***COMING IN 2026***

Armenian Tserakordz (“handwork”) Circles (Oakland, CA)

A lifelong learner with a world-shaped heart, Elise Youssoufian (Էլիզ Եուսուֆեան, she/they) is a San Francisco Bay Area-based Armenian poet, transdisciplinary artist, and practitioner-scholar committed to healing and liberation. With faith and hope in Earth-honoring, alchemical acts of creativity and connection, Elise has been teaching in the arts since 2009 and offering Armenian needlelace workshops in the US and Armenia since 2021. Hand-in-hand with works rooted in compassion, cultural recovery, and collective healing, she is also a board-certified therapeutic musician and treasures her practice of aikido, a Japanese martial art of peace.

Walking with Zabel Yessayan’s life-affirming inquiry, “how does beauty resist?,” and driven to inhabit and invigorate patterns of their foremothers, Elise is developing a PhD dissertation in the field of Women’s Spirituality on Armenian needlelace and relationships between handwork, healing, and resistance. Back in 2018, Elise began becoming literate in their first language, Western Armenian, en route to ancestral journeys throughout Turkey and Armenia in 2019. Through volunteering at Yerevan’s Teryan Cultural Center, she started learning to make needlelace and Marash embroidery, a long-held dream come true, and has refined her Armenian needlework practices on her own ever since.

In 2021, Elise journeyed back to Armenia for an artist residency and stayed through 2022, climbing mountains and studying carpet-weaving traditions, drawing upon past experience restoring antique SWANA (Southwest Asian and North African) rugs. After returning to the Lisjan (Ohlone) territory of Huchiun (Oakland, California) to address a cancer diagnosis, they co-facilitated field work in Istanbul and curated a nearly year-long museum exhibition, Armenian Needlelace: Poetry in Thread. Currently cancer-free, Elise now serves as an Armenian needlework consultant for their local chapter of Hamazkayin, a global Armenian educational and cultural organization.

Elise earned a Master of Fine Arts degree in Interdisciplinary Arts and Writing from the California Institute of Integral Studies, studied folklore and psychology at UC Berkeley, and participated in artist residencies in Chiapas and Yerevan. In the wake of the 2020 war in Artsakh (a.k.a., Nagorno-Karabakh), while in Armenia they launched an arts activism initiative, Sound of Ten Thousand Stones, participated in the International Armenian Literary Alliance’s inaugural mentorship program, and reflected on wounding and healing for the Armenian Weekly column, “Walking and Asking.” Other related works include poems in International Gallerie, Fools Fables, HyeBred Magazine, Armenian Poetry Project, and Kooyrigs’ forthcoming Looys: Voices of Resistance in Verse.

Repair and restoration guide Elise onward as she explores the burdens and blessings of her lineages. On farms and vineyards in historic Armenia (today’s eastern Turkey), her foremothers made lace and worked the land, weaving patterns of language, story and place until disruptions loomed. Elise’s motherline is from Bitias, one of six Armenian villages which persisted until 1915 in Musa Dagh, a mountainous region known for its beauty and its peoples’ resistance to annihilation during the Armenian Genocide (1915-1923). One great-grandmother, Mayreni of Antep, survived death marches through the deserts of Der Zor with two of her seven children. Another great-grandmother, Arousiag of Smyrna, endured the death of her husband—who had been murdered like many other Armenian priests—and found refuge in Egypt with their five daughters, the youngest of whom was Elise’s paternal grandmother, Alice.

As the grandchild of displaced genocide survivors and offspring of orphaned immigrants, Elise is fueled by solidarity with all who struggle for the right to exist and by the belief a healing world is possible. In support of crucially needed humanitarian aid, she helps raise funds for Kooyrigs, Middle East Children’s Alliance, and others. To learn more about their motivations, see “A Granddaughter of Genocide Survivors Dreams of Never Again” by Dana Mashoian Walrath, an award-winning author, artist, and anthropologist.

SELECTED POEMS / POETRY READINGS

SELECTED EXHIBITIONS / FACILITATIONS / PRESENTATIONS / PROSE PUBLICATIONS

ARTS TEACHINGS

  • Armenian Needlelace Workshops and Circles / Armenia and the US: 2021 onward
  • Private Voice Lessons + Group Workshops and Song Circles / California: 2014-2019
  • Beginning, Intermediate and Advanced Metal Arts Instruction / The Crucible (Oakland, CA): 2009-2014

HEALING ARTS DEGREES / CERTIFICATES / CERTIFICATIONS

  • Armenian Carpet-Weaving Certificate / KTUT Armenian Carpet and Rug (Yerevan): 2022
  • Pranic Healing Certificate / Eco Ayurvedic and Yoga Center (Yerevan): 2022
  • Trauma-Informed Leadership Certificate / Pocket Project (Virtual): 2021
  • Master of Fine Arts, Interdisciplinary Arts and Writing / California Institute of Integral Studies (San Francisco): 2021
  • Principles of Collective Trauma Healing Certificate / Pocket Project (Virtual): 2021
  • Clinical Musician Board Certification / Harp for Healing (Virtual): 2019
  • Reiki I Certification / AbSOULute Health (Oakland): 2015
  • Sound, Voice and Music Healing Certificate / California Institute of Integral Studies (SF): 2015

SELECTED HEALING ARTS MENTORSHIPS / SCHOLARSHIPS / RESIDENCIES

NOTES ON IMAGES:

  • Top of this page: Aruchavank, 7th century Armenian church (2021)
  • Home page: A matrilineal mountain path in Musaler, currently within the bounds of Turkey (2019)

NOTES ON INQUIRIES (from home page):

  • “How does beauty resist?” is inspired by the life and works of Zabel Yessayan, via Nancy Agabian.
  • “What makes you come alive?” is from author, educator and civil rights leader Howard Thurman: “Don’t ask yourself what the world needs. Ask yourself what makes you come alive, and go do that, because what the world needs is people who have come alive.”