Armen Danilian is a twenty-four year old, Armenian-American photographer whose debut exhibition Behind the Curtain ran Monday, April 14 from 5:00pm to 9:00pm at 814 Broadway.

Born in Moscow and raised in Brooklyn, he has absorbed countless aesthetic and cultural influences throughout the course of his eclectic upbringing. He attended Abraham Lincoln High School, where he was a part of the prestigious photography program under the tutelage of Howard Wallach and Carlos Molina, before enrolling at New York University to pursue his passion full-time. Since then, he has been the recipient of multiple industry honors, among them the Scholastic Art & Writing Awards, and has had his work featured in the New York Times, the Los Angeles Times and New York Magazine, among others. He has previously exhibited in the Brooklyn Museum of Art, Rose Burlingham Gallery and a number of traveling group exhibitions.

Armen has toured extensively with the Mariinsky Ballet, Opera and Orchestra, the Bolshoi Ballet and the Eifman Ballet of St. Petersburg as the unofficial photographer and tour manager of Ardani Artists Management, Inc. The opportunity has afforded him a lifetime of practical experience in dance production, as well as an intimate perspective on its human component. His personal travels, meanwhile, have taken him around the world and back. They include an exhaustive voyage by rail across the Russian Federation and a recent trip to his ancestral homeland in the semi-autonomous republic of Nagorno-Karabakh. Interested in observing the complexities of human interaction firsthand, Armen has made meaningful connections with many of the people he has encountered along the way.

The photographs that appear in his first exhibition and the accompanying catalogue represent the best of an ongoing project dedicated to capturing the Russian Ballet industry from the inside out. Armen steers clear of traditional performance photography, opting instead to focus his lens on organically evolving, intensely human moments that occur between the ballet dancers and their environment when the curtain falls. The result is a revealing, behind-the-scenes look at an almost fastidiously insular industry.

While Armen’s images of the ballet are among his most pointed and methodical, his oeuvre tackles a wide range of subjects, from quintessential street scenes, to vignettes of village life, to classical art compositions. Whatever his subject matter, Armen brings to his craft a fresh, interpretive point of view that is balanced, age notwithstanding, by the gravity and discipline of a mature photographer.

Armen currently lives and works in New York City.

Written by Anna Khachiyan