Ani Mkhitaryan, known as An1, is an Armenian-American artist whose work explores resilience, spirituality and the human experience. She also works as a hospice nurse, where daily exposure to life's fragility shapes recurring themes of healing and rebirth in her art. She began minting NFT art in March 2021 and has since incorporated AI into collections such as No1 Knows.
Mkhitaryan was born in Armenia, where her heritage is rooted in the ancient civilizations of Urartu and Anatolia. She lived in New York for eleven years before settling in Los Angeles. The COVID-19 pandemic pushed her into frontline nursing work. During the same period, war in her homeland took the lives of relatives and friends. Both experiences fed directly into her art, deepening its focus on grief, healing and rebirth. In ARCL1NE, she explores transformation and the divine feminine, drawing on the idea from her hospice work that death is a transition rather than an end. Mandalas recur throughout her work as a symbol of “wholeness, balance, and healing”. In No1 Knows, she used AI to explore hidden aspects of life and her own experience. The resulting images carry “a quality reminiscent of film photography with a twist”.
