USC Dornsife Institute of Armenian Studies brings the studio to LA

USC Institute of Armenian Studies brings the studio to LA

With a mobile studio in a retrofitted food truck, USC Institute of Armenian Studies is traveling throughout Southern California to encourage and invite people to record their life stories.

LOS ANGELES - The University of Southern California is doing something unique and special this month in honor of Armenian History Month in Los Angeles County.

#MyArmenianStory is a crowdsourced oral history project organized by USC’s Institute of Armenian Studies.

You can come down to the truck and have someone record you, or you can record on your own from the comfort of your own home.

"There is a QR code, go to the questions, go to how you do it, how you upload-- and that's it— you're part of history!" explained Salpi Ghazarian, Director of Armenian Studies at the USC Dornsife Institute.

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"This is the first time we have taken the studio to the people. For years the focus of the institute's programming has been to collect and document stories to document 20th century Armenian history, the Iranian revolution, the Lebanese civil war, the fall of the Soviet Union — all the old Armenian Americans who have been here for five, six, seven generations. This is a do-it-yourself crowdsourced project," said Ghazarian.

There is of great significance that a lunch truck was converted into a mobile studio.

"The truck is loaned to us by Vahe Karapetian who runs Vahe Enterprises, a typical American rags to riches story. He took the cold sandwich trucks that we all knew, in factory parking lots 40 years ago and turned them into hot trucks, which of course are part of LA life today. So we took one of his trucks and turned it into a studio," said Ghazarian.

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