Mado Kelleyan is an artist and experience designer specialising in digital cultural heritage. Using immersive tools like VR and AR, she creates portals, interventions in physical and digital spaces that hold space for stories not so often told. Powerful yet empathetic, her work invites audiences to know through feeling, offering multi-sensory experiences that spark connection, interaction, and discovery.

She holds an MA in Information Experience Design from the Royal College of Art & a BA in Textile Design from Central Saint Martins. Her work has been featured in Esquire Middle East, Stir World, Hyperallergic & The Dezeen Awards. She has exhibited at London Festival of Architecture, Breeze Film Festival, London Design Festival & The Museum of Contemporary Art, Belfast. 

Recent residencies include the Goethe Institut, Al Ma’mal Foundation & Safar Film Festival. Her VR project, Stories From My Grandmother’s House, is currently on tour as part of The Lost Paintings: A Prelude to Return. 

Commercially, she has over 10 years of experience designing interactive projects for clients including The Smithsonian, Bestival & IKEA.

STORIES FROM MY GRANDMOTHER’S HOUSE

Stories From My Grandmother’s House is a virtual reality experience that follows the story of my family across Southwest Asia, designed to hold space for my heritage and experience it as if it is a memory. The audience arrives in a room in my grandmother’s house in Haifa in the 1930s, full of my grandfather’s paintings and decorative elements reconstructed from online and family archives, celebrating the rich cultural heritage of both sides of the family. The audience then adventures through my grandfather’s paintings into different scenes in the family story, from a shipwreck off the coast of Akka in the 1700s to Aleppo in 1915, to the wells of Haifa in the 1930s. The project is currently on tour as part of The Lost Paintings: A Prelude to Return.

ARMENIAN CERAMICS | DIGITAL ARCHIVE

Upcoming for 2026–27, the project is an interactive portal into the Armenian Ceramics of Jerusalem, mapping the history of the ceramics from their origins in Kutahya to contemporary Jerusalem. 

Combining technology with storytelling & visual research, the experience enables audiences to explore Armenian ceramics as a series of curated journeys through the Armenian Quarter, such as ‘patterns as a language’, ‘historical origins’ and ‘craft in exile’.

The project brings ceramics to life as an expression of place, community and heritage, offering audiences worldwide an accessible way to “travel” to Jerusalem - starting as an interactive archive and leading to an immersive experience.

Created in collaboration with Kayané  Antreassian and supported by the Calouste Gulbenkian Foundation & Armenian Treasures.

THE SMITHSONIAN | POLYGLOT

Polyglot is a printed conductive ink audio guide commissioned for the Smithsonian’s Futures Exhibition, designed in collaboration with the curatorial and visitor experience teams. Published in what is expected to be the five lingua franca of the future, Polyglot aims to increase accessibility whilst offering a vision of the future that can embrace technology whilst preserving traditional materials and processes such as print.

Touching the hotspots on the inside of the map allows visitors to orient themselves within the exhibition, as well as enabling them to “follow their nose” and adventure through the content.

THE LIBRARY OF LOST STORIES

The Library of Lost Stories is an ongoing VR and web-based cultural heritage project where participants work collaboratively to create interactive worlds, using their own words, artwork, sound and sensory design to explore how stories can be told spatially. Workshops have been delivered for the Custom House, Our House Oral History project in Newham, preserving oral histories in spaces of erasure as the area undergoes redevelopment, as well as for the University of Leeds, The Royal College of Art and the Goethe Institut. The image shows a story created with students from Newham in East London.

CITY SARHA | AUGMENTED REALITY WALKING TOUR

City Sarha is an augmented reality walking tour of Jerusalem’s modern cultural history. The first stop brings Jaffa Gate to life, creating a playful portal into the city in the first half of the 20th century, where audiences can explore culture, festivals and image making in Palestine during the British Mandate Period. The app will be subsequently expanded to include more stops throughout the city, including the Armenian Quarter.

Coming soon, in collaboration with Sary Zananiri.