In order to commemorate the genocides of the 20th century, Tigranna Zakaryan wants to start where many survivors ended up: Los Angeles.

Zakaryan is a 2014 Carl Wilkens Fellow at Los Angeles-based nonprofit i-ACT and is organizing Sharing Our Stories: Voices of Survivors, a panel discussion with genocide survivors and musical performance (by Angolan vocalist and master guitarist Waldemar Bastos) co-sponsored by USC Shoah Foundation. The event is Sat., April 11, 1 to 4 p.m. at the Brand Library and Art Center in Glendale, Calif.

Like the genocide survivors who will be speaking on the panel, Zakaryan is herself an immigrant to the United States. She was born in Armenia and came to America in 1995 after the Nagorno-Karabakh War between Armenia and Azerbaijan. Yet it wasn’t until she moved from Hollywood to Seattle for college that she began to long for a more significant connection to her Armenian roots.

A trip to Armenia and Turkey gave her the connection she was looking for – but she noticed that even people who lived there didn’t feel the same.

“When I went to Armenia I noticed there was such a disconnect between the two [countries] because of the closed border,” Zakaryan said. “People weren’t able to communicate and share their cultures with one another, they didn’t have that privilege.”

While living with a host family of genocide survivors in Rwanda for five months, Zakaryan saw again how important it is for genocide survivors to feel empowered to tell their stories.

These experiences provided the inspiration for Saturday’s event. The panel will include two Holocaust survivors, Renee Firestone (whose testimony is in the Visual History Archive) and Harry Davids; Cambodian Genocide survivor Laura Som; Bosnia-Herzegovina survivor Julija Zubac; Armenian Orthodox priest Father Vazken Movesian; and Rwandan Genocide survivor Edith Umugiraneza, who is also a consultant at USC Shoah Foundation. Zakaryan said the discussion will focus on healing, forgiveness, and how they were each able to build their lives in Los Angeles after genocide.

By examining genocide in those terms, Zakaryan hopes to make the concept of genocide more accessible to younger, American audiences who may not be able to fully comprehend what the survivors went through and what communities around the world are still dealing with today.

On the eve of the 100th anniversary of the Armenian Genocide, Zakaryan believes Armenians have an opportunity to be leaders in commemorating all genocides of the past century.

“I really hope to send a message to the Armenian community specifically as we commemorate the Armenian Genocide centennial and move into the next 100 years,” Zakaryan said. “How we can engage our activism to use the Armenian Genocide as our backbone and our responsibility to act on behalf of those who continue to be affected by genocide?”

She said she identifies strongly with USC Shoah Foundation’s mission to preserve history through survivors’ stories, and hopes to draw on those themes in her own community-building work.

“People can go on their laptops, they can read history books, but it’s such a different experience to connect to a personal story,” she said.