ARMENIAN NEEDLELACE INITIATIVE

At a time when Armenian needlework is experiencing an upsurge in interest among Armenian makers, families, and communities around the world, artists and scholars Deborah Valoma and Elise Youssoufian have joined forces to help revitalize Armenian needlelace traditions by launching a new project, the Armenian Needlelace Initiative, on March 20, 2026. Through online resources and upcoming calls for participation, their mission is to engage the global network of Armenian needlelace practitioners, researchers, curators, collectors, and enthusiasts.

The Armenian Needlelace Initiative is the first comprehensive website to support Armenian needlelace traditions by encouraging learning and making, fostering connection across scattered populations, providing a forum for cultural exchange, and building a warehouse of resources on technique, care, references, exhibitions, instruction—with more content to come. The site is filled with original and historic photographs and contains portfolios of contemporary makers, stories, poems, public and private collections, as well as an essay reflecting on the past, present, and evolving futures of Armenian needlelace.

Many Armenian families across the globe carefully save collections of needlelace, crochet, embroidery, and other textiles made by their mothers, grandmothers, and aunties. These are wrapped in tissue or cloth and tucked away on top wardrobe shelves or under beds. But as can often happen worldwide with art practices dismissed as “women’s work” or “ethnic/folk art,” this is an underresearched topic.

Historically, children learned Armenian needlelace and other forms of traditional handwork from their female relatives, neighbors, and friends in a continuous line of succession. However, this form of transmission has become increasingly discontinuous in the economic, social, and familial fractures experienced by Armenians from the late nineteenth century onward. For many, reviving textile traditions is an act of resistance and the intimacy of face-to-face communication and hand-to-hand transfer of skill yields relational and embodied experiences. But in dispersed communities this is not always possible.

Co-founders Deborah Valoma and Elise Youssoufian offer the Armenian Needlelace Initiative as an alternative. As Armenians living in diaspora, they came together with a shared goal: to reclaim an ancestral art form in jeopardy. Their research on the tradition includes analyzing existing scholarship, conducting field research and interviews in the United States, Armenia, and Turkey, and honing their own needlelace skills—out of which the idea for this initiative emerged in 2024. Valoma is an artist, weaver, author, and professor emerita of textile history and theory at California College of the Arts. Youssoufian is a poet, artist, needlelace teacher, and Women’s Spirituality PhD student at the California Institute for Integral Studies. They acknowledge with gratitude the assistance from individuals and organizations in developing this project.

“Through the Armenian Needlelace Initiative, Deborah Valoma and Elise Youssoufian do more than preserve—they continue the unbroken thread.”

Gassia Armenian, Research Curator, Fowler Museum at UCLA