Dr Hasmik Gasparyan
Lecturer in Directing for Film and Television

Profile

Biography

I have been awarded a fully funded British Chevening study scholarship and moved to the UK to do my MA on Screen documentary at Goldsmiths, University of London; and further, a PhD by Creative Practice at the University of York after working for more than ten years professionally on various television productions as a television director and an independent filmmaker in Armenia; and a visiting filmmaker in Germany and Netherlands. My move from film practice to film academia allowed fascinating discoveries for me as a filmmaker - questioning the systematic and accepted industry norms, expectations and assumptions; looking into theoretical concepts and trends in film and television to understand the tendencies and shifts more holistically.

I aim to combine film theory with real world film practice and am committed to supporting innovative and ethical documentary storytelling. I am interested in space ‘between’ - ‘fiction and non-fiction’; ‘theory and creative practice’; ‘sound and silence’; ‘presence and absence’; belonging anywhere and to yourself.

Research

Overview

My PhD 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.

I find interdisciplinary research by creative practice fascinating as it provides me with the opportunity to continue making films and collaborate with colleagues from different fields to learn more about the world we live in. One of the recent interdisciplinary research projects we completed with colleagues from the UoY School for Business and Society and Dept. of Language and Linguistic Science - Vocal Authenticity - resulted in ‘My Voice Journey’(2025) documentary on Middlesbrough community singing group. Here by testing co-creating documentary methods of filmmaking, we dived into the reality of our vulnerable contributors to hear their ‘voice journeys’ and learn about the impact the singing activities have on their challenging lives. This film has been presented at various national and international events including York Festival of Ideas 2025 and screening at the Club De L’Etoile in Paris in 2026. Currently I am working on ‘After Image’ research project, which focuses on embodied filmmaking and looking at elements of re-visiting the spaces/places/faces in documentary filmmaking to allow ‘recycling’ of the stories - re-telling/re-thinking/re-writing to find the hidden story.

I am an active member of Directors UK, Women in Film and Television UK (WFTV) and British Film and Television Screen Studies (BAFTSS). I worked as a film pre-viewer for the Sheffield Doc/Fest International Film festival.

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