Julian Chehirian is an artist and PhD candidate in the History of Science at Princeton University whose research probes histories of art making as therapeutic practices in psychiatry and psychotherapy.
His dissertation, “The Clinical Studio: Art, Attention, and the Mind Sciences,” argues that art-oriented therapeutics in the early twentieth century emerged not as techniques for interpreting meaning in works of art, but as programs for reshaping attention. Spanning case studies from American psychiatric institutions to state-socialist Bulgaria, it recovers how structured creative encounters with materials were designed to reorganize subjectivity—and how competing political systems advanced divergent projects for attention across the Cold War divide.
He represented Bulgaria at the 2024 Venice Art Biennale with The Neighbours (with Krasimira Butseva and Lilia Topouzova, curated by Vasil Vladimirov), a multimedia installation about the psycho-social and cultural legacy of political violence in Bulgaria. An outcome of twenty years of research and ten years of studio work, The Neighbours unsilences a history of political violence left unacknowledged by the Bulgarian state after 1989, proposing how historians might narrate histories absent from archives or subjected to collective silence. The pavilion was supported by the Department of History, IHUM, and the Humanities Council at Princeton, as well as by the University of Toronto and the Ministry of Culture of Bulgaria.
His scholarly writing appears in edited collections from Yale University Press, Columbia University Press, and Bloomsbury, and in Culture, Medicine and Psychiatry. He was previously a Fulbright researcher in Bulgaria and holds a B.A. in Interdisciplinary Studies from American University.
