Diana Markosian is staggeringly talented, thoughtful, creative and articulate. We had some technical difficulties on our first recording, so I got to be overwhelmed by her amazingness TWICE. She is brave, both in an "I'm going to sneak across this contested border" way and an "I'm going to dig deeper than deep into this personally painful territory to create" way, which is awe-inspiring. You're going to really enjoy this one.

Diana Markosian is an American and Russian artist of Armenian descent, working as a documentary photographer, writer, and filmmaker. She is an artist known for her collaborative approach to storytelling, which explores themes of family and immigration through a layered, interdisciplinary process that uses video, photography, found images, drawings and historical ephemera. Her work is both conceptual and documentary, allowing her subjects to dictate the outcome of their work. Her projects have taken her to some of the remotest corners of the world, and have been featured in National Geographic Magazine, The New Yorker and The New York Times.

Her first monograph, Santa Barbara, was published by Aperture in November. The project recreates the story of Markosian’s family’s journey from post-Soviet Russia to the U.S. in the 1990s, pulling together staged scenes, film stills, and family pictures in a   compelling hybrid of personal and documentary storytelling. In it, the artist grapples with the reality that her mother, seeking a better life for herself and her two young children, escaped Russia and came to America. Markosian’s family settled in Santa Barbara, a city made famous in Russia when the 1980s soap opera of that name became the first American television show broadcast there. Weaving together reenactments by actors, archival images, stills from the original Santa Barbara TV show, Markosian reconsiders her family’s story from her mother’s perspective, relating to her for the first time as a woman, and coming to terms with the profound sacrifices she made to become an American.