Presenters’ Bios

Dr. Vahram Petrosyan is the Director of the Ins􀆟tute for Armenian Studies at Yerevan State University. He holds a PhD in History, specializing in Oriental Studies and Middle Eastern poli􀆟cs. Dr. Petrosyan is the author of numerous scholarly works on Middle and Near Eastern Studies, Interna􀆟onal rela􀆟ons and diplomacy, as well as Foreign Policy Analysis. He has served as Head of the YSU Chair of Interna􀆟onal Rela􀆟ons and Diplomacy (2017–2022) and as the Academic secretary of the YSU Scien􀆟fic Council (2006–2012). He is fluent in several languages, including Armenian, Russian, English, Turkish, Kurdish, and Hebrew.

Prof. Arman A. Safaryan is a senior lecturer in the Dept. of Philosophy at the Armenian-Russian University and has published articles on the interchange between philosophy and spiritual culture in convergent and multimedia sites and on the fundamental questions relating to the academic and educational spheres. He has also co-authored the translation and philological and historical notation of the academic publication of the traditional Kazakh philosophical prose of Abai in Black Speech (2020) and Kazakh Folk Tales (2023).

Dr. Joseph Azize is a priest in the Maronite Church, living on the Central Coast of New South Wales. He has published in three areas, Religious Studies, Ancient History, and Law (having been acting senior assistant Director of Public Prosecutions for the Commonwealth of Australia Australia). In addition to his religious duties, he is chairman of the Gurdjieff Society of Newport, which was founded in 1986 by George and Helen Adie, personal pupils of both Gurdjieff and Ouspensky. His most important publication is Gurdjieff: Mysticism, Contemplation, and Exercises (OUP, 2020), which made public the continuity between Gurdjieff’s system of practical mysticism, and the Hesychast tradition.

Dr. Steven Sutcliffe was previously Lecturer and Senior Lecturer in the Study of Religion at the University of Edinburgh from 2005 to 2025 and is currently Visiting Research Fellow in Studies in Religion at the University of Sydney. He was President of the British Association for the Study of Religions from 2015-2018.

He is a scholar of religion in late modernity with a focus on two main fields: new religion/s and ‘spirituality’ and the history of academic Religious Studies since 1950. His publications include Children of the New Age: A History of Spiritual Practices (2003) and three-co-edited collections: Beyond New Age: Exploring Alternative Spirituality (2000, with Dr Marion Bowman), New Age Spirituality: Rethinking Religion (2014, with Professor Ingvild Sælid Gilhus) and The Problem of Invented Religions (with Professor Carole Cusack).

He has published numerous articles on the Gurdjieff movement. These include, as solo author, ‘Hard Work: Locating Gurdjieff in the Study of Religion/s’ (2014) and ‘Gurdjieff as a Bricoleur: understanding the “Work” as a Bricolage’ (2015). Co-authored publications include ‘G. I. Gurdjieff and the Study of Religion/s’ (with Carole Cusack, 2015), ‘Issues in Accessing a Gurdjieffian Tradition: Lessons from a Study of Maurice Nicoll (1884-1953)’ (with John Willmett, 2016), ‘’The Work’: the Teachings of Gurdjieff and Ouspensky in Russia and Beyond’ (with John Willmett, 2020) and ‘ “Only This Will Bring Results”: Practising Gurdjieff’s Exercises in a Search Culture’ (with Joseph Azize, 2024).

Prof. Michael Pittman is currently Inaugural Director of General Education at the American University of Armenia. His research and publications have focused primarily on the life and writings of G.I. Gurdjieff. Drawing on a background in Comparative Literature and Religion, he returns to Armenia and Turkey for research, especially on the life of Gurdjieff and the traditions and practices of Sufism. His book-length work Classical Spirituality in Contemporary America: The Confluence and Contribution of Gurdjieff and Sufism (Continuum, 2012) addresses the cultural and religious influences on Gurdjieff’s work, as well as the influence that Gurdjieff and Sufism continue to have in contemporary religious and spiritual culture in North America. His latest article entitled “Concluding Beelzebub’s Tales: Gurdjieffian Notions of the Soul and the Import of Human Life,” appeared in the Alternative Spirituality and Religion Review.

Dimitri Peretsi pursued graduate work in philosophy at Yale University. He is currently director of the Gurdjieff Foundation of Greece and has lectured widely in Paris, New York, London, and Amsterdam on topics relating to Gurdjieff’s teaching and practice. The author of several books, articles, and plays exploring those themes in different ways, he approaches the teaching primarily through the lens of Philosophy of Mind.

TJ Clark has been a student of Gurdjieff’s writings and teaching since 1974. Inspired by the Gurdjieff Work, he returned to college in his late 20s and pursued a career in medicine, specifically in Neurology and completed a neurology residency in New York in 1995.

Over the past thirty years, he has been practicing in various capacities including serving as the stroke director for several hospitals, testifying as a medical legal expert and instructing students and residents both in the classroom setting and at the bedside.

He has taken a particular interest in attempting to fathom the gist of Beelzebub’s Tales as it pertains to medicine and his specialty of Neurology. In his office hangs a framed quotation attributed to Mullah Nassr Eddin: “For our sins, God has given us two kinds of physicians, one kind to help us die and the other to prevent us living.”

Davit‘ R. Mosinyan is an associate professor in the Department of Philosophy at Yerevan State University where he chairs the fields of History, Theory, and Logic. His main research interest lies in the field of epistemology. He has conducted research on Gurdjieff’s philosophical language of being.

Ani Haig Tateos Bostanian is a multifaceted professional with a rich background in literature, finance, and spirituality. Holding a BA in English Literature and Old English from Al-Mustansiriya University in Baghdad, Iraq, and an MBA from the University of Phoenix in Arizona, US, Ani has bridged the worlds of academia and business with remarkable ease.

As a Reiki Master and practitioner, she brings a holistic approach to her work, emphasizing balance and harmony. Ani is also a dedicated educator and entrepreneur in finance, leveraging her expertise to drive growth and innovation. Notably, she is one of the founders of the Gurdjieff school in Armenia, where her work is centered on revitalizing living teachings and making them accessible to the community. Through her endeavors, Ani aims to inspire personal growth, spiritual exploration, and intellectual curiosity.

Mikhail Koshubarov gained a degree in oil refining from Moscow State University of Engineering Ecology (Moscow Insttute of Chemical Engineering) and one in catastrophe psychology from Russian State Social University. He leads the Moscow Gurdjieff Group (having joined in 2004) and the Gurdjieff Group of Temple Dances and Movements that are actvely involved in the translaton and publicaton of "pure" and completely authentc texts of Gurdjieff's literature. The group inaugurated the series "Gurdjieff. The Fourth Way" in 2011, in which eight books have since appeared. Under Koshubarov’s guidance, weekly Movement classes are held in Moscow, as well as regular meetings to study the ideas described in P.D. Ouspensky's In Search of the Miraculous, and monthly open meetings dedicated to the Ideas of Work. Meanwhile, other affiliated groups study the ideas and Movements in several cites in Russia and the CIS.

Dr. Alexey Iskakov is a scholar at the Moscow Institute of Physics and Technology of the Russian Academy of Sciences with a research profile in Computational Physics and Game Theory. He has been involved in the textual analysis of Gurdjieff’s works for several years.

Michael A. Goorjian is an actor, filmmaker, and writer. He won an Emmy Award for Outstanding Supporting Actor in a Miniseries or Special for his role as David Goodson in the television film David's Mother (1994). As a director, Goorjian achieved recognition for his first major independent film, Illusion (2004), which he wrote, directed and starred in alongside Kirk Douglas. For two decades he was involved in the Gurdjieff Work in San Francisco.

Carole M. Cusack is Professor of Religious Studies at the University of Sydney. She trained as a medievalist and her doctorate was published as Conversion Among the Germanic Peoples (Cassell, 1998). She now researches primarily in contemporary religious trends and Western esotericism. Her books include (with Katharine Buljan) Anime, Religion and Spirituality: Profane and Sacred Worlds in Contemporary Japan (Equinox, 2015), Invented Religions: Imagination, Fiction and Faith (Ashgate, 2010), and The Sacred Tree: Ancient and Medieval Manifestations (Cambridge Scholars Publishing, 2011). She edited (with Alex Norman) Handbook of New Religions and Cultural Production (Brill, 2012) and (with Pavol Kosnáč), Fiction, Invention and Hyper-reality: From Popular Culture to Religion (Routledge, 2017). She is the Editor of Literature & Aesthetics (journal of the Sydney Society of Literature and Aesthetics) and Journal of Daesoon Thought and the Religions of East Asia (Daejin University, Korea).

Dr. Gayane Shagoyan, Leading Research Fellow at the Institute of Archaeology and Ethnography of the Armenian Academy of Sciences, is the author of some ninety publications. Her main research interests include daily life, urban anthropology, and memory studies. She has written extensively about the social and cultural life of the city of Alexandrapol.

Prof. Elke Shoghig Hartmann is an Ottoman historian specializing in Ottoman and Armenian history of the 19th and early 20th century, holding the chair for Ottoman Studies and Turcology at Free University of Berlin. Her research interests focus mainly on military history and the history of violence, microhistory of the Armenian provinces of the Ottoman Empire, Ottoman and Armenian self-narratives, memory and historiography, and trans-Ottoman entanglements. In 2010, she co-founded the project "www.houshamadyan.org" on everyday life and culture of Armenians in the Ottoman Empire, and in 2016, the Chair of Armenian Studies at the Péter Pázmány Catholic University of Budapest.

Prof. Levan Khetaguri, Director of the Arts Research Institute of Georgia, UNESCO Chair coordinator of the Georgian State Technical University, Tbilisi, and Director of the Gurdjieff Center of Georgia, is an international expert on theatre studies, higher arts education, and cultural policy and research. A member of the UNESCO Executive Council and European Cultural Parliament, as well as of various international institutions and advisory and scientific boards in Brazil, China, Italy, etc., he has been involved in diverse forms of international cultural exchange since the late 1980s and since 1990 has participated in several hundred local and international projects as initiator, manager, producer, or participant, in addition to lecturing and organizing workshops in different parts of the world.
The author of several monographs on drama, for which he received an award from the Swedish Writers Guild (2000), he has published over eighty articles and translations that have appeared in multiple languages on his main research areas of theatre and the performing arts.
The founder of the Gurdjieff Institute Tbilisi (GIT) in 2019 on the centenary of the opening of Gurdjieff’s original institute there, he has advanced the study of Gurdjieff’s teaching over the last two decades by holding two international conferences (2007, 2022) and an interactive exhibition (2020), producing a documentary film (2021), translating into Georgian his Struggle of the Magicians (2019) and Thomas and Olga de Hartmann’s Our Life with Mr. Gurdjieff (2022), editing the Georgian version of Gurdjieff’s Life is Real only When I Am (2009), and authoring Gurdjieff and Twentieth Century Culture.

Avetik Melik-Sargsyan, founder of the Gurdjieff Armenian Center in Gyumri, has pursued research on the life of George Gurdjieff in Armenia over the past twenty-five years. In the course of investigations at the Armenian State Archive, he discovered documents on the Gurdjieff’s family’s civil-legal registration in Alexandrapol as well as their house, street, and other valuable biographical data. In the old cemetery of Gyumri he succeeded in locating Gurdjieff’s father’s gravestone in 1995, thus saving it from loss. As a historian, he has compared and corrected the inaccurate translation of Armenian historical places, proper names, and philosophical terms occurring in English, Russian, and French publications of Gurdjieff’s Meetings with Remarkable Men and Beelzebub's Tales to His Grandson.

He has published in the “Historical and Cultural Heritage of Shirak,” Eighth International Scientific Session of the Shirak Center for Armenological Studies of the National Academy of Sciences of the Republic of Armenia (2010), in Hamaynapatker, a literary and cultural magazine in Los Angeles (2018), and several other scholarly journals.

His monograph Gurdjieff and Armenia is scheduled for publication later this year.

Lawrence Rosenthal is a composer, arranger, conductor and pianist who studied in Paris with Nadia Boulanger. His best-known film scores are The Island of Dr. Moreau, and Clash of the Titans. He is a seven-time winner of Emmy awards and has been nominated for two Oscars and two Golden Globes. He is a recognized interpreter of the Gurdjieff-De Harmann musical repertoire.

Dr. Lilit Yernjakyan is a Leading Researcher at the Institute of Art of the Armenian Academy of Sciences and professor at the Komitas State Conservatory of Yerevan. A corresponding member of the Ararat International Academy of Sciences (Paris) and member of the International Council for Traditional Music and Composers’ Union of Armenia, her main research interests include the Armenian sacred and bardic traditions and interactions between the Armenian, Iranian, and Turkish musical spheres, as well as the modern art of musical composition. The regular presenter of papers at local and international conferences, she has authored around eighty articles in Armenian, Russian, and English. Her seven monographs include From the History of Armenian-Iranian Musical Ties (1991) and Ashugh Love Romance in the Context of Near Eastern Musical Interrelations (2009. Her most recent volume The Musical World of Alan Hovhaness: East-West Crossroads (Cambridge Scholars Publishing, 2023) is dedicated to the musical legacy of one of the most prolific and prominent Armenian-American composers, in the context of East-West cultural interactions.

Vergine Gulbenkian, M. Phil. (Oxon), BCST, RCST, is a craniosacral therapist and storyteller based in London. Led to investigate the power of performance storytelling as a direct, immediate means of communication, she has researched the Armenian tradition of the ashugh (bard), on which she produced a documentary film. She has been a student of Gurdjieff’s teaching and practitioner of the Gurdjieff Work for three decades and is a perceptive analyst of the integration of the Gurdjieff movements into his wider philosophy of life.

Dr. Cynthia Bourgeault is a modern-day mystic, Episcopal priest, writer, and internationally known retreat leader. She divides her time between solitude and sailing the waters around her seaside hermitage in Maine and a demanding schedule traveling globally to teach and spread the recovery of the Christian contemplative and Wisdom paths.
Cynthia is a core faculty emeritus at the Center for Action and Contemplation in Albuquerque, New Mexico. She has been honored by the annual Watkins Review as one of the 100 most spiritually influential living people in 2021.