Mado Kelleyan

About

Mado Kelleyan is an artist & experience designer from London. Her work uses immersive technologies such as VR & AR to create portals – interventions in physical and digital environments designed to hold space for under-represented stories from human & non human worlds.

Powerful but empathetic, her work focuses on knowing through feeling, engaging audiences with alternative ways of understanding the world through rich, multi-sensory experiences that audiences remember long after they leave.

Presently, she is working on Stories From My Grandmother’s House, a VR film that tells the story of her Palestinian and Armenian family.

Growing up in the diaspora, the project is designed to hold space for heritage and experience it as if it is a memory, exploring how digital technologies can reconnect communities with lost spaces and cultures.

The audience arrives in a room in her grandmother’s house in Haifa in the 1930s, full of her grandfather’s paintings and decorative elements reconstructed from online and family archives, celebrating the rich cultural heritage of both sides of the family. The room functions a little like Narnia, with the audience able to adventure through different objects into scenes from the family story, from a shipwreck off the coast of Akka in the 1780s to the adoption of her grandfather in Aleppo during the Armenian Genocide in 1915, through to her grandparents meeting by chance in Haifa in 1932.

She has exhibited at London Festival of Architecture & SXSW and has over 10 years of experience in the creative technology sector designing and delivering immersive projects for clients including The Smithsonian, Bestival, IKEA & Amazon.

She holds a BA in Textile Design from Central Saint Martins and was the recipient of the Vice Chancellor’s Achievement Scholarship at the RCA.