Marie Lou Papazian connects TUMO, Peleshyan and Armenian identity
BY PAUL CHADERJIAN
GLENDALE – Marie Lou Papazian stood before the TEDxLittle Armenia audience a few months ago and traced the beginning of TUMO to a personal moment that many Armenian families would recognize.
She was studying education and technology at Columbia University. She was also seven months pregnant with twins. Her husband was in Los Angeles, caring for their three young boys.
“My life was split,” Papazian said. “On one side, I was fully immersed in academia, cognitive science, learning theories, instructional design, how memory works. And on the other side, I was constantly thinking about my kids. What choices will they have? What kind of education would they get? What life is going to be for them?”
That tension became the starting point for one of the most important Armenian education ideas of our generation.
Papazian, the founding chief executive officer of the TUMO Center for Creative Technologies, spoke at TEDxLittle Armenia at USC’s Bing Theatre. The event brought together Armenian voices from education, film, technology, law, design, robotics, music and civic life.
Marie Lou Papazian
Shushan Karapetian organized the event, with Kristine Sargsyan as co-organizer. The program grew out of a collaboration between the USC Dornsife Institute of Armenian Studies and TEDxYerevan. Its theme, “Hybrid Identities,” gave speakers a wide frame to talk about Armenian life across countries, professions and communities.
The lineup included Ani Adjemian, Ashot Arzumanyan, Aroussiak Gabrielian, Karen Khachikyan, Armen Derkevorkian, Marie Lou Papazian and Sev Ohanian. Ludvig Ispiryan and Natalie Palmgren also performed. The speakers moved through ideas of belonging, potential, design, kindness, music, technology, Hollywood, public life and the Armenian imagination.
Papazian’s talk focused on education and identity. She spoke about how learning happens when ideas connect.
“In one of my classes in cognition, we were studying how memory works,” she said. “Effective learning happens not when information is stored as isolated facts, but when ideas are connected, like a network, like a web.”
That quote carried the heart of her message. She described learning as a living system. It grows through connection. It strengthens through choice. It becomes meaningful when it touches the life of the learner.
Papazian said her own children helped her see that idea clearly.
“I started thinking about my kids, how they loved learning when they were given choices, when they were given freedom, when learning was like a passion, not a pressure,” she said.
That sentence also explains why TUMO feels so different from many traditional education systems.
TUMO gives teenagers room to choose. It lets them explore technology, design, animation, music, game development, writing, photography and other creative fields through a self-guided model. Students work at their own pace. They join workshops. They build skills through discovery.
Papazian described TUMO this way: “The TUMO Center for Creative Technologies is a learning environment where teenagers develop their skills at the intersection of design and technologies. They are given total freedom to explore different skill areas. There are no grades, no competition, no exams.”
That model now reaches far beyond Armenia.
The newly-launched TUMO Los Angeles gives Southern California’s Armenian and non-Armenian communities a direct connection to an idea created in Armenia and now shared with the world.
For decades, Armenians in Los Angeles built institutions to preserve language, culture, memory and community. TUMO adds another chapter to that story. It brings a new Armenian model of learning into one of the largest Armenian communities outside Armenia.
That matters because Armenia has exported something original and useful. It has offered the world a fresh education model built around confidence, creativity and self-direction. It gives teenagers a structure without crushing their curiosity. It trusts them to move toward their own interests while giving them mentors and tools to grow.
Papazian connected that educational idea to a broader Armenian story.
She spoke about the question Armenians often ask one another: Where are you from?
“Every time I meet a new Armenian, they ask me where I am from,” Papazian said. “They mean from which Armenian community I come from. Well, it’s difficult. Bear with me. I was born in Egypt, raised in Lebanon. I moved to New York when I was 23. Then I went to Spain when I was 28 where we had the kids.”
She then told the audience about leaving Barcelona. Her Spanish friends asked why the family would leave a place where they had built such a good life.
“We told them we wanted to raise our kids in an Armenian community and to have them go to an Armenian school,” she said. “So, you’re going to Armenia? Well, no, Glendale, California. That was really, really difficult to explain.”
That sentence captured the complicated map of Armenian life. Glendale can function as a cultural home. Los Angeles can carry a version of Armenia. Armenia itself can surprise those who arrive with an inherited picture of the homeland.
“So, where am I from? I don’t know,” Papazian said. “I was an Armenian Diasporan, a truly Diasporan.”
Eventually, she and her family moved to Armenia. She said they have lived there for 20 years.
“An Armenia that was not the idealistic homeland of my imagination, and an Armenia that was not the diaspora I knew so well, a new Armenia, a different Armenia that emerged and became visible,” she said.
That “new Armenia” shaped TUMO.
In her talk, Papazian brought in the Armenian filmmaker Artavazd Peleshyan to explain how meaning can arise when images, memories and experiences meet. She called him one of her favorite directors and described how his films create powerful connections through the way images sit next to each other.
That reference matters because Peleshyan’s films have long asked viewers to bring their own memory and emotion to the screen.
In my own writing about his films “We” and “Seasons,” I saw how individual images carry clear meaning on their own. A crowd moves. Earth shifts. Wheels turn. Shepherds carry sheep through rushing water. Hay comes down a hill. Bread and cheese appear. A bride prepares for celebration.
Once Peleshyan places those images in sequence, they begin to speak to one another. They create feeling. They suggest labor, survival, movement, repetition, belonging and the small joys that give life shape.
Papazian used that same idea to talk about life, identity and education. Her own path moved through Egypt, Lebanon, New York, Spain, Los Angeles and Armenia. Her work grew through motherhood, scholarship, technology and community. TUMO came from those connections.
That gives TUMO Los Angeles its deeper meaning.
It is a school. It is also a statement. It says Armenian identity can create new tools for the world. It says a small country with a global diaspora can build ideas that travel. It says young people can learn through freedom, structure, imagination and trust.
At TEDxLittle Armenia, Papazian gave the audience a way to understand that achievement. She did not frame Armenian identity as a fixed inheritance. She described it as something active, layered and creative.
Her talk made the case that Armenians can carry many places at once and still build something coherent. They can draw from diaspora memory, Armenian reality, family life, intellectual life and creative ambition. They can make institutions that belong to Armenia and to the world.
TUMO Los Angeles now places that idea in the middle of Southern California.
It gives Armenian teenagers and their neighbors access to a model born from an Armenian experience and built for a global future. It also gives the diaspora a new kind of pride. Armenia has produced a learning system that other cities want to adopt.
For a people often asked where they are from, TUMO offers another answer.
It asks what they can create.
Paul Chaderjian is a Los Angeles-based broadcast journalist, writer, and author of the novel “Letters to Barbra.” His work explores diaspora identity, cultural memory, and global storytelling. Follow Paul on social media @pchadNEWS.
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