Chehirian’s dissertation presents a history of "attention therapies"—a set of mid-century experiments at the interface of studio art and the therapeutic mind sciences. The project demonstrates that human attention—its direction, character, and objects—came to constitute a key concern for psychiatrists, educators and public health officials across the 20th century. In parallel, it questions how the category of attention, chaperoned through practices of clinically supervised artistic production, emerged as the core of a set of therapies that sought to counter the pathological effects of wayward and "psychotic" attention. Ranging from early experiments in art psychotherapy to mental hygiene, occupational therapy, phenomenological psychiatry and spiritually inflected somatic practices, the project follows a constellation of unlikely art and science researchers—including experimental educators, fine artists and self-taught psychologists—who entwined psycho-scientific and artistic practices to re-envision post-war psychotherapy and psychiatry.  

Questions of historical method are also central to his practice as an artist. Chehirian’s historical exhibition “The Neighbours", which represents the Bulgarian Pavilion at the 60th Venice Art Biennale, was named one of strongest pavilions of the biennale by The Guardian and Artforum. The project unsilences a history of political violence that was left unacknowledged by the Bulgarian state after 1989. A product of 20-years of research and 10-years of studio work, the project (a collaboration with Krasimira Butseva and Lilia Topouzova curated by Vasil Vladimirov) proposes how historians might narrate histories absent from archives or subjected to collective silence. The pavilion has been supported by the Department of History, IHUM, and the Humanities Council at Princeton, as well as by the University of Toronto and the Ministry of Culture of Bulgaria.

Chehirian is currently organizing a symposium in collaboration with Professor D. Graham Burnett on the future of artistic-research and practice-based research.

His scholarly writing appears in edited collections for Yale University Press, Columbia University Press, Bloomsbury, and in Culture, Medicine and Psychiatry.

He was previously a Fulbright researcher in Bulgaria, and prior to that, received a B.A. in Interdisciplinary Studies from American University.