Artashes Aleksanyan, the Honored Artist of the Republic of Armenia whose work spanned the theatre, cinema, and the front lines of the Artsakh War, has passed away at the age of 64. He was hospitalized for three days before passing at dawn on July 6, 2026, his friend Harutyun Bogaryan told Armenpress. He would have turned 65 on July 17.
He was born in 1961 in Yerevan. His path into the arts began at the studio of the Gabriel Sundukyan National Academic Theatre, where he trained from 1982 to 1984 under the renowned actor Khoren Abrahamyan. He continued his studies in Moscow at the All-Union State Institute of Cinematography from 1984 to 1988, studying under the celebrated Armen Dzhigarkhanyan, an education that placed him in the lineage of two of the most important figures in Armenian performing arts.
Aleksanyan returned to the stage as an actor at the Sundukyan National Academic Theatre from 1988 to 1990, and soon moved into film. In 1990 he appeared in “The War of the Three Kings” and “The Princess of the Fallen Fortress,” earning the “Best Actor of the Year” award for the latter. His screen work would grow to include roles in “Russian Ark,” “Garegin Nzhdeh,” “Poker.AM,” “Don’t Be Afraid,” “Special Forces Unit,” “The Other Side of the Medal,” and numerous other films and television series over the decades that followed.
When war came to Artsakh, Aleksanyan set the stage aside. From 1991 to 1992 he fought as a volunteer, serving as an honorary member of the Mahapart, the Death-Defiers detachment, joining the generation of Armenians who took up the defense of Artsakh.
He returned to the theatre after the war, acting at the Mher Mkrtchyan Artistic Theatre in Yerevan from 1992 to 1994, then working with the Lenfilm studio and several Armenian television companies through the mid-1990s. From 1998 to 2001 he served as a director at the Mother Theatre in the Czech Republic, where he staged five productions, including Shakespeare’s “Macbeth” and Gogol’s “The Government Inspector,” bringing his range as an artist to the European stage.
His talents reached beyond performance. During his years in the Czech Republic he held two solo exhibitions of his paintings. His work carried a deep national dimension throughout, and he staged productions dedicated to the 1700th anniversary of Armenia’s adoption of Christianity as a state religion and to the memory of the Armenian Genocide. In 2004, his name was entered in the Encyclopedia of the Armenian Diaspora in recognition of his contribution to preserving and spreading Armenian culture abroad.
Artashes Aleksanyan was an artist who moved between the theatre, the cinema, the canvas, and the battlefield without ever losing sight of the nation his work served. Named an Honored Artist of the Republic of Armenia in 2017, he leaves behind a body of work across stage and screen, and the memory of a life given fully to Armenian culture and to Armenia itself.
