Hrag is an art critic, curator, artist, podcaster, and mentor. He is also the co-founder and editor-in-chief of Hyperallergic, an independent art publication created in 2009 with his spouse, Veken Gueyikian.

Under Vartanian's leadership, Hyperallergic has grown to reach millions of readers per year and is credited with revitalizing arts journalism over the last two decades as audiences moved online. As a home for brave voices around the world, Hyperallergic is known for its unflinching coverage of artists, communities and movements fighting for inclusion and equity, reflecting Vartanian’s career-long exploration of art, politics and social justice. 

Since its founding 15 years ago, Hyperallergic has published over 2,500 writers and critics, and as editor-in-chief, Vartanian has helped foster a new generation of writers who reject art market-oriented coverage to focus on criticism and reporting that appeals to a broader cultural audience.

He is the host of the Hyperallergic podcast, which has released more than 100 episodes and featured numerous notable guests such as Audrey Flack, Thomas Lanigan-Schmidt, Lucy Lippard, Linda Nochlin, Michael Rakowitz, Shahzia Sikander, John Yau and artists at Standing Rock during the 2016 Dakota Access Pipeline protests.

Throughout his career, Vartanian has forged a path of unconventional art writing that embraces ephemerality, speed and new forms of criticism that often evade “value creation” and book publishing. He often incorporates social media, photography, video, live-blogging, memes, graphic journalism and other less traditional art criticism formats into his writing, all inspired by his own journaling practice and personal blog started in 2006. 

His work often explores ideas around trauma, displacement, decolonization, diasporan consciousness, racialization, propaganda, community engagement and the evolving role of art in society, which is informed by his own post-genocide heritage as a Syria-born, Canada-raised, queer Armenian who currently lives in the United States. 

In addition to essays, such as “Where is the Public Discourse Around Art and Technology?” written in 2021 for the National Endowment for the Arts and “Imagining the Future Before Us” for “The Artist as Culture Producer,” edited by Sharon Louden, Vartanian has given numerous keynote lectures, including at the American Craft Council in 2019 about the role of craft in his family and how it influenced his evolution as a writer. He has also participated in hundreds of grassroots events in smaller venues across the country where he speaks to artists, critics and art lovers more directly and intimately. In the fall of 2024, he delivered a performance lecture, titled “Roots Across Diasporan Time,” with Aroussiak Gabrielian at the Artsakh Uprooted: Aftermaths of Displacement symposium at the University of Southern California.

In 2021, he edited a special dossier for Hyperallergic about Artsakh, also known as Nagorno-Karabakh, titled “Artsakh: 🏺Cultural Heritage Under Threat🛡,” that features writing by leading thinkers and reporters in the field and was called “probably the most important collection of cultural heritage studies published last year and … a substantial introduction for future academic research on the war in Artsakh/Nagorno-Karabagkh” by the Journal of the Society of Armenian Studies.

Vartanian has created various curatorial projects through Hyperallergic that embrace liminal spaces, including a 2010 pioneering interactive art exhibition that explored social media, “#TheSocialGraph,” “Presents: Three Months of Mail Art” in 2011, and “The World’s First Tumblr Art Symposium” in 2013. 

Vartanian has been a visiting critic at the Rhode Island School of Design, University of California-Davis, Brooklyn College, Pratt Institute, Indiana University and Columbia University, among many others, and was a Poynter Fellow at Yale University in 2024. He was a lead mentor at the Chautauqua School of Art from 2019-2022. 

Grappling with the early days of the 2023 war in Gaza, Vartanian created “Forbidden Protest Sign,” a mural for Home gallery in Manhattan’s Chinatown, channeling the potential of public art to reach people beyond traditional spaces and challenge media narratives.

Vartanian earned his bachelor’s and master’s degrees in art history from the University of Toronto. He and Gueyikian, publisher of Hyperallergic, live in Brooklyn, New York.