Zakoyan was born in France to Armenian parents and moved to Chicago when still a child. After finishing high school, he joined the US Navy and participated in the Korean War. It was during this period that he was trained as a photographer and served on the carrier U.S.S. Philippines. He furthered his studies in sculpture and photography at the Chicago Institute of Design, where one of his tutors was Harry Callahan. An active exhibitor in both mediums, Zakoyan devoted most of his later life to teaching. His work has been included at the Smithsonian Museum of American History in Washington D.C.

As a photographer, Zakoyan adhered to various movements of late-modernist American art, from minimalism to conceptualism. His work often addresses the fascinating relation between sculpture and photography. Looking at the most mundane and insignificant objects, the artists systematically explored the way photography could bring out the hidden aesthetic and spatio-voluminal qualities of what we often deem to be banal.

Vigen Galstyan, 2016