Hi I'm Vahe.
After working as a Cataloguer in the Armenian Manuscripts at the British Library, I moved into policy research and data analytics at the Institute for Public Policy Research and the Children's Commissioner for England. From there I moved into international risk and crisis management, a path that took me through BP, Booking.com, and McKinsey, working across energy, travel, tech, and consulting. I moved from London to Amsterdam, and managed crises and risk across all continents, travelling the world in the process.
In April 2023, I saw a crisis developing that only very few people could address: the one facing my own Sudanese-Armenian heritage in light of the brutal war that began in Sudan. My response was sudanahye, a multimedia history and archiving project that's taken me around the world for research, seen me publish research papers, be interviewed on TV, and present in academic institutions such as Harvard to cultural institutions like Goethe Sudan in Cairo. Ultimately I merged my curiosity about my family's history with the need to preserve Sudanese and Armenian cultural heritage in response to the crisis in Sudan, and along the way, made friends and colleagues, and learnt a lot about myself and the world.
Across my professional life, I've handled crises at every scale, developed and executed crisis communications plans, been a self starter in managing teams in multi-national organisations and in my cultural heritage project, operationalised media strategy from planning to delivery, and conducted research across archives. Since the development of Generative AI I have integrated AI into all elements of my work, from heritage management to comms.
Whether you're an individual, a multinational, a research project, or an NGO, my professional journey so far has given me the skills to help with projects regardless of scale, and organisations big or small.
Get in touch if you think I can help!
Consulting-trained, applied across heritage and risk. Each of these draws on the same underlying skillset: structured research, stakeholder management, integrating technological approaches, and turning complexity into something usable.
Oral history, archival research, and documentation projects, built and run the way I built sudanahye, from research design through to public archiving.
Media strategy for cultural heritage work, multilingual, youth-focused, and built for the outlets people actually pay attention to: social media, press, podcasts.
Crisis management, business continuity, and risk/geopolitical intelligence, consulting-trained at McKinsey, applied in practice at Booking.com, BP and McKinsey.
The intersection: applying risk and crisis management practice to the specific pressures facing heritage organisations and cultural preservation work.