Welcome to Writepudding. My name is Liana. I’m a journalist, blogger and tea lover who was born in Iran and raised in Los Angeles.

I’ve written about the alarming trend of  unclaimed bodies piling up in Los Angeles County, L.A.’s struggle to reduce the staggering number of pets entering its shelters each year which end up being euthanized and numerous pieces on L.A’s Middle Eastern and Armenian communities, from protests on the recent upheaval in Egypt to domestic violence issues and other issues of civil interest.

My work regularly appears in publications such as Los Angeles Times Community News, LA Weekly, EurasiaNet, New America Media, Ararat Magazine and Spot.us, a non-profit project for the “Center for Media Change,” funded by the Knight Foundation. I’ve also written for Bitch, Paste and Edible Los Angeles, the former two which are now more or less defunct.

Before I recently joined the ranks of freelance journalists everywhere in order to further my passions in an industry I love despite its bipolar and unforgiving tendencies, I worked as an editor at a new media company where I collaborated with writers, copy editing and fact-checking their work as well as with publications like the Atlanta Journal-Constitution, USA Today and the San Francisco Chronicle. I also dabbled as an editor and writer for sites like Los Angeles CityZine and ScreenCrave.

Currently, I run an independent  online multimedia publication called ianyan, which focuses on the Armenian Diaspora and the Caucasus and occasionally the Middle East. My work on this labor of love has appeared in publications based in Armenia, including HETQ and ArmeniaNow,  and has been recognized by Amnesty International and Global Voices.

I am interested in human rights, women’s issues, culture, race and demographics, the environment, the Middle East and how ordinary people are affected by the  world, its leaders and their policies.

You can find my portfolio here.

In between my posts about media, photography, news in the Caucasus and Middle East,  you’ll find that I occasionally bake and take pictures while I’m doing it. It’s the only thing that seems to calm the chaos in my world. I call it therapy.

“Writepudding” is more of an inside joke than I’d like it to be. It was created during a conversation I had with my boyfriend, when we combined my love for writing and his love for rice pudding, which I was convinced was horrid. I was wrong. Overtime, the phrase has evolved to mean that I can write about anything I want, without limitations or restrictions on my very own space, and I think that’s a freedom that all writers and journalists can appreciate.