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Yahjian is a filmmaker whose work spans fiction, experimental, documentary and commercial modes. Questions of self, place, time, power, truth and memory are central to her storytelling practice, rooted in her experience of liminality as a fourth-generation artist of exile. Her residency will foreground the works she has produced since graduation as blueprints for a demystified cinematic approach achieved through personal excavation, creative constraint and immediacy, and framed by a permeating ethics of equity. Her investment in alternative trajectories of production, collaboration and media community-formation and the ways she has carried experimental sensibilities into commercial and commissioned work without forsaking her creative voice will be key throughlines across the week.

Yahjian’s latest hybrid experimental documentary, Domestic Demon, had its world premiere at the 2026 International Film Festival Rotterdam, its U.S. premiere at the 2026 Slamdance Film Festival, and continues to play leading festivals on the global festival circuit. Yahjian and the project were recently featured in Occidental Magazine’s “A Ticket to Slamdance.” Learn more about Yahjian and her work on her .

As a student at Occidental, Yahjian epitomized the liberal arts, graduating cum laude and Phi Beta Kappa in 2011 with a B.A. in English, with a Creative Writing emphasis, and a minor in MAC (then the Film & Media Studies Program in the Art History and Visual Arts Department). She received the 2011 Benjamin Culley Prize, the Dean’s Award for Excellence in Equity, the McCracken Award, and the Nancy J. Freedman Prize for Creative Writing. She also won first place in both fiction and nonfiction in the SA���ʴ�ý Literary Contest and was part of the inaugural cohort of students to  teach participatory video and photography practices in Rwanda, to name only a few of her storied accomplishments. She served as president of  the Armenian Students Association, a reporter and section editor for The Occidental (then The Occidental Weekly), and editor of the literary magazine Steez. 

Her status as an SA���ʴ�ý alumna makes her visit especially resonant for candid conversations with students about identity, creative vocation, inner life, family, and more expansive understandings of success in a rapidly changing moment for media and the creative industries. During the residency, Yahjian will participate in a range of high-impact class visits and lead a Socratic workshop focused on providing feedback on students’ works-in-progress. These activities will give students opportunities to engage her approaches to creative practice, collaboration, production process, and professional adaptability. 

The residency will include two public events open to the broader Occidental and Los Angeles communities:

Artist Talk and Screening with 2026 MAC Artist-in-Residence Anahid Yahjian
Tuesday, September 8, 7:00–9:30 p.m.
Choi Auditorium
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Yahjian will screen selected works and reflect on the experimental, collaborative, commercial, and personal dimensions of her media career, as well as the sustained creative voice and spirit of experimentation that connect them.

Acho: Cinema of Armenian Girlhood — Screening and Discussion
Thursday, September 10, 7:00–9:30 p.m.
OXY ARTS, 4757 York Blvd.
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Curated by Yahjian and presented in partnership with OXY ARTS, this program of transnational contemporary films made by and/or about Armenian women moves literally, figuratively and chronologically through the embodied life stages of girlhood and womanhood both in modern-day Armenia and outside of it. “Acho” was the childhood nickname of Yahjian’s grandmother, short for “աղջիկ” (agh-cheeg - “girl”).  Both events are free and open to the public and are designated CORE 99 events.

The 2026 MAC Artist-in-Residence program is made possible with generous support from the Susan C. Hahn ’65 and Ronald R. Hahn ’66 Media Arts and Culture Endowed Fund and the Remsen Bird Fund.