Dr Hasmik Gasparyan
Lecturer in Directing for Film and Television

Profile

Biography

From 2000-2010 Hasmik Gasparyan worked as a television director specialising in unscripted documentary single camera production as well as scripted multicamera entertaining and educational television production in Armenia. Some of Hasmik’s works focusing on cultural diversity and vulnerable representatives of the society have been presented at different international events/festivals. The ‘Boundless 2008’ UNESCO prize has given Hasmik the opportunity to take media internships at Westdeutscher Rundfunk (WDR) in Germany and Dutch Programme Foundation (NPS) in The Netherlands. Since 2010, Hasmik has been working in the UK as an independent self-shooting director with particular interest in documentaries.

Hasmik’s practice-based research PhD study completed in 2019 (University of York), is presented through the production of two original observational documentary films – ‘Three Pianos’ (2016) and ‘Narara and Kiko’ (2018). 

Hasmik is a recipient of British fully-funded Chevening Scholarship; Armenian General Benevolent Union’s International scholarship and The University of York TFTI Departmental Bursary. Hasmik worked as a film pre-viewer for the Sheffield Doc/Fest International Film festival and is an active member of Directors UK and BAFTSS. 

Research

Overview

Hasmik holds a PhD by Creative Practice in Film Production from the University of York and has two MA degrees in Screen Documentary from Goldsmiths, University of London and Feature Film Direction from Armenian State Pedagogical University.

Hasmik’s research by creative practice focuses on exploration of the aesthetics of film sound (particularly ‘cinematic silence’); and explores observational, slow and experimental cinema. It looks at cinema from the late 1960s onwards and investigates the representation of silence in film by studying the directorial approaches used by Akerman, Haneke, Antonioni, Tarkovsky, Kubrick, Keiller and Wiseman.

The recent ‘My Voice Journey’ (2025) documentary film was funded and created as part of the interdisciplinary YorVoice Research Project.

Publications

Selected publications

‘My Voice Journey’ (2025) short documentary funded and created as part of the interdisciplinary YorVoice Research Project, University of York.

Gasparyan, Hasmik (2025) ‘Film Group Project as an Educative Adventure’ -Chapter 8, AMPS conference proceedings series 38

Gasparyan, Hasmik (2024) chapter ‘Silence in Chantal Akerman’s Films’ inThe Place of Poetics within Documentary Filmmaking: The Art of Fact edited by K. Marley. Cambridge Scholars Publishing

Gasparyan, Hasmik (2019) Investigating the Making of Cinematic Silence. PhD thesis, White Rose, University of York

Winner of the Best Postgraduate Research Poster competition from the BAFTSS 2019. Recipient of a Joint Honourable Mention in Moving Image (Documentary & Image) for the Best Practice Research Portfolio from the BAFTSS 2020