Nice to meet you! We are sisters Tato, a linguist, and Astrid, a visual artist. Combining our creative powers, we established Word Wanders to show the beauty and hidden treasures that can be found in something as ordinary as language.
Tato Martirossian
When Tato was nine years old, she wrote in her glitter pony notebook that she wanted to become 'a language scientist, or an astronaut.' In pursuit of her plan A she studied Linguistics at the Universities of Utrecht and Leiden, and Arabic at the University of Amsterdam, but was allured after graduation to discover worlds outside of academia. She worked as a professional belly dancer, a museum guide, a textbook writer and a language instructor, all the while sharing fun facts about the origins of words to attentive and indifferent ears alike.
The obsession with (sharing stories about) etymology started to become a problem, so Tato consulted her sister Astrid, who decided that something needed to be created to channel this urge. And so Word Wanders was born.
Astrid Martirossian
The enormous piles of paper sheets, pencils and drawings in Astrid’s childhood made one thing pretty clear: her destiny is to be in the creative field. As expected, Astrid studied animation at the Willem de Kooning Academy in Rotterdam. Her role in Word Wanders is to douse everything in visual awesomeness: presentations, images, websites and so on. Although a highly visual creature, she shares her sister’s obsessive love for the verbal beauty of language and could listen to etymology-related podcasts all day long.
To satiate her voracious creative appetite, she also sells personal artwork under the moniker Marti’s Creatures, takes on freelance design jobs that fit her artistic taste, and bakes the occasional sweet treat (dark chocolate takes the cake, as they say).