Born in Tbilisi, Georgia, 1981. Lives and works in Armenia. Karen Mirzoyan is a photographer with a Diploma of Excellence in World Press Photo Seminars in Armenia, obtained in 2005. As a photojournalist and a documentarian, Mirzoyan’s work has been widely published in major periodicals in Armenia, Russia, Europe and the USA. In 2010 Mirzoyan won three major awards of the Magnum Foundation: the ‘Emergency’ grant, the Magnum Caucasus Award and full scholarship for the New York University/ Magnum Foundation Photography and Human Rights Program. Since 2010 Mirzoyan has also been guest-lecturing on documentary photography at different universities in the USA and Russia. At once visceral and poetic, Mirzoyan’s extensive photo-stories document ongoing political conflicts and social problems in the Caucasus, Middle East, East Europe, ex-USSR republics and the USA. The photographer has a persistent interest in people on the margins of society and his work has done much to spread light on the lives of suicide survivors, homosexuals and war victims in territories across the ex-USSR. In recent years Mirzoyan has increasingly shifted his focus towards art photography. His experiments in this field aim to expand and comment upon the formal and aesthetic structures of the medium. Mirzoyan’s work has been shown in numerous group and solo exhibitions since the mid-2000. @mirzoyan_pro