Vardan Petrosyan was born on February 27, 1959, in
Yerevan,
Soviet Armenia. He graduated from the Terlemezian Art College in 1983. His father died in 1981, when he was 22 years old. After a two-year service in the Soviet Army, he returned to Yerevan in 1985 to establish—with
Vahram Sahakian—the private theatre studio called
Vozniner (Ոզնիներ, "Hedgehogs"). Between 1988 and 1992, when the
Karabakh movement was in progress, Petrosyan wrote and staged several politically motivated performances. Until 1997, he played in short and feature films. Due to the harsh economic conditions in Armenia, Petrosyan moved to Paris in 1992. He appeared in several French plays. Beginning in 2000, Vardan Petrosyan has been mainly performing one-man shows on various politics and social issues. Besides Armenia, he has also performed for the
Armenian diaspora communities in the United States, France, Canada, Lebanon, Iran, Syria, Russia, etc. After being treated in a Yerevan hospital, on November 9, Petrosyan was charged with "negligent breach of traffic rules, which causes death" and was taken into custody. The court rejected pleas to have him released on bail, despite a petition that eventually garnered 11,000 signatures. Petrosyan pleaded not guilty on January 26, 2015. He was sentenced to five years in prison on January 29, 2015, by a lower court in
Kotayk Province. Petrosyan was released on September 2, 2015, and served the rest of his punishment
outside prison. He was released in March 2017. ==Performances and filmography==