Keynote Speaker

Dr. Sozita Goudouna is a professor, curator and author. Dr. Goudouna’s book Beckett’s Breath: Anti-theatricality and the Visual Arts was published by Edinburgh Critical Studies in Modernism and released in the US by Oxford University Press. She holds a PhD on American high-Modernism from the University of London, and an MA from King’s College London and RADA Royal Academy of Dramatic Arts. She has had a distinguished 20-year career in the cultural sector, serving in many executive roles prior to becoming the director of the non-profit Greece in USA in 2020. Her internationally exhibited projects include participations at the New Museum, Performa Biennial in New York, Documenta, Onassis Foundation New York, French Consulate NYC, Hunterian Museum, Benaki Museum, Byzantine Museum, EMST Contemporary Art Museum among others. 

She is head of operations at Raymond Pettibon Studio, adjunct professor at Pace University, and visiting professor at City University New York (CUNY) and New York University. She has taught at New York University since 2015 as the inaugural Andrew W. Mellon Curator fellow at Performa Biennial in NYC. She has also taught at the New School, SUNY, Roger Williams University, and the University of the Peloponnese among other universities. Prior to joining Performa, she was the three year artistic director of the 1st EU-funded research and exhibitions program in Athens, under the auspices of the Ministry of Culture. During her directorship, she curated and commissioned projects by Martin Creed, Santiago Sierra, Lynda Benglis, and Roy Ascott. 

She collaborated in 2014 with Marina Abramovic for the production of “Seven Deaths”. She is the founding director of the US non-profit Greece in USA for the promotion of contemporary Greek art. Sozita served as treasurer of the board of directors of AICA Hellas International Art Critics Association and as member of the board of directors at ITI International Theatre Association UNESCO.

 Confirmed Speakers

Dr. Nicholas Alexiou is professor of Sociology at Queens College, CUNY.  Born in Volos, Greece, he studied economics in Athens and in the mid-1980 he moved to New York for graduate studies in Sociology.

His fields of interest are social and political sociology, ethnic studies and research.  He has established the first Oral History Archive, Library, and Museum, for the Greeks of New York. He is the Director of Research of the Hellenic American Project (HAP), at Queens College, documenting the Hellenic American presence in the United States from the first wave of mass immigration in 1900 to the present. 

He is a Visiting Professor at the Hellenic American University.

Nicholas is the author of six books of poetry, and many of his poems have been published in Greek and American journals and anthologies.  He is a member of the Greek Authors Association (Greece), and the Greek American Writers Association (NY). 

Dr. Eugenia Arsenis is a director, dramaturg and choreographer. She studied Dramaturgy and Directing at the Department of Drama, Theatre and Media Arts at Royal Holloway University of London, and pursued her postgraduate studies in Philosophy and her Doctorate in Philosophical Aesthetics, Opera and Greek Tragedy at the University of London. She then went to Boston University where she was a Visiting Researcher for Musical Analysis and Opera Directing at the School of Music of the College of Fine Arts. Moreover, she studied Film Directing at the New York Film Academy. Throughout her studies and over fourteen years of training in the theory and performance of music and dance, Eugenia received a number of scholarships, among them from the Fulbright Scholarship for Artists and Art Scholars, Onassis Foundation, National Bank Cultural Foundation, New York Film Academy, Royal Holloway University of London, Propondis Foundation, San Francisco Opera Center, Bogliasco Foundation and the Greek State Scholarship.

Dr. Arsenis has been the Coordinator and Dramaturg of the Experimental Stage of the Greek National Opera from the moment of its inception and the Dramaturg of the Center for Contemporary Opera in New York. As a director, she has collaborated with international organizations such as the Royal Albert Hall, Center for Contemporary Opera, San Francisco Opera Center, Skylight Music Theatre, Greek National Opera, National Theatre of Northern Greece, and the Florentine Opera, while for her artistic work, she has been honored by important festivals all over the world, from the BBC Proms in London to the San Francisco Opera Center in the United States. As a writer, her play, Women of Passion, Women of Greece, has travelled the past few years from Australia to India (production, Railway Carriage Theatre), while recently she directed, adapted and co-produced a film adaptation of the first American play written on the Greek War of Independence, which has been organized by the Cultural Committee of the American-Hellenic Chamber of Commerce with the coordination of the International Relations for Culture and the financial support of the Hellenic American University, the Hellenic American Union and Dr. Arsenis herself.

Eugenia has also served as President of the Hellenic Center of the International Theatre Institute, Board Member of the National Theatre of Northern Greece and the Greek Film Center, and Registrar of Public Relations of the Hellenic Theatre Studies Association. She is the co-Founder of the international forum Artivism Drives Democracy, Member of the Cultural Committee of the American-Hellenic Chamber of Commerce and the Delegate of the Greek Directors’ Guild at the Federation of European Directors. She has presented at a number of international conferences, and has taught at many Universities and artistic institutions, among them, the University of Peloponnese, the Ionian University, the University of Athens and, the Hellenic American University where she currently teaches and for which she designed the Minor in Theater and Performance program.

Dr. Sotirios Bahtsetzis is a curator, essayist, and educator based in Athens. He has a summa cum laude PhD in History of Art from the Technische Universität Berlin. He is an Associate Professor in Theory of Contemporary Art and Curating Practices at the Department of Culture, Creative Media and Industries of the University of Thessaly. He is also Adjunct Faculty at the European Culture Program of the Hellenic Open University and a Fulbright Research Scholar (2009) at Columbia University, New York.

He has curated many group exhibitions, such as Going Viral (2022) and Homemade Exotica (2019) in Berlin, Roaming Images at the 3rd Thessaloniki Biennale (2011) and Open Plan at the 13th Art Athina (2007). Bahtsetzis’ research interests include installation art, the theory of curating, socially engaged art, gender studies, image theory, post-industrial design, media theory, and theories of post-humanism.

He contributes essays to several exhibition catalogues and art magazines, such as the New York-based E-flux Journal. He is a member of the IKT (International Association of Curators of Contemporary Art), AICA (International Art Critics Association), the AAMC (Association of Art Museum Curators), the EEIT (Hellenic Society of Art Historians) among other professional bodies.

Dr. Fotis Georgiadis is a classical archaeologist and Head of the Northern Greece Department of the Ephorate of Palaeoantrhopology-Speleology, Greek Ministry of Culture. He received his Bachelor, Master and PhD Degrees in Classical Archaeology from the Department of History and Archaeology of the Aristotle University of Thessaloniki.

Prior to his current appointment, he worked at the Archaeological Museum of Thessaloniki, the 16th Ephorate of Prehistoric and Classical Antiquities and the Archeaological Institute of Northern Greece. As a field archaeologist, he conducted archaeological excavations in Northern Greece (Karambournaki, Derveni, Lebeithra, Lete, Volvi, Polichni, cave of the Nymphs at N. Irakleitsa, Drakotrypa cave at Thasos) and he has published papers, concerning material from these sites, in scientific journals, conference proceedings and collective volumes.

As a museum curator he worked in the recent redesign of the permanent exhibition of the Archaeological Museum of Thessaloniki. He is former General Secretary and board member of the Association of Greek Archaeologists. His current research involves ancient cave shrines in the north Aegean and ancient ceramic assemblages.

Hariklia Hari is an architect, urbanist and researcher on participatory planning practices. As an NTUA PhD candidate she is exploring the significance of community engaged territorial networks to cultural management.

Her collective work mainly focuses, through projects or exhibitions, on the notion of the community as space of production and transformation referring to questions of participation, free knowledge, auto-organization, creating environmental design strategies, formatting autonomous zones and creating new ways of cultural production, distribution and activism that cross into real-life social situations and institutions.

For the museum project SOMA (Scattered Open Museum of Attica), she is working since 2015 on the idea of a museum open to the city and local communities. She is currently curating “Microgeographies” project on Participatory Territorial Narrative Practices.  

Dr. Alexander Kitroeff is Professor of History at Haverford College in Pennsylvania. Born in Athens and educated in the U.K, he received a D. Phil in Modern History at Oxford University.

His research and publications focus on identity in Greece and its diaspora. Prior to joining Haverford College, he taught at Queens College CUNY, Princeton University and New York University and has also taught at The American College of Greece and College Year in Athens.

The most recent of his six books are The Greeks and the Making of Modern Egypt (American University in Cairo Press, 2019) and Greek Orthodoxy in America: A Modern History (Northern Illinois University and Cornell University Press, 2020). He has served as the historical consultant in several documentaries including “The Journey: the Greek Dream in America”; “Smyrna 1922 – the Destruction of a Cosmopolitan City”; “Athens from East to West, 1821-1896”. Alexander teaches in the General Education program at Hellenic American University.

Dr. Thodoris Koutsogiannis is the Chief Curator of the Hellenic Parliament Art Collection. He studied archaeology and art history at the University of Athens (bachelor 1996; master 2000), where he presented successfully his PhD (2008) on Ciriaco d’Ancona’s drawings and their influence in the art and antiquarianism of the Renaissance.

Additionally, he attended seminars and conducted research, on scholarships, in various universities and institutes abroad (La Sapienza, Rome 1998 and 2000; Warburg Institute, London 2001-02; Scuola Normale Superiore, Pisa 2003; Istituto di Studi Umanistici, Florence 2005-08; Princeton University 2011).

He has curated various exhibitions and their catalogues, at the Hellenic Parliament and the National Archaeological Museum in Athens, as well as at the Municipal Art Gallery of Chania, in Crete. His last exhibition “Beholdig Liberty!”, on display at the Hellenic Parliament building, commemorates the Greek War of Independence. He has presented many papers in international conferences and published various essays in collective volumes, as well as one monograph on Philhellenism in the arts (2017).

He is studying modern art, especially concerning the artistic reception of Antiquity and the impact of the Greek cultural heritage to the modern visual culture.

Marie Koutsomallis-Moreau is Head of Collections of the Basil and Elise Goulandris Foundation, and lives in Athens, Andros and Paris. She holds a Master’s degree in Strategy from the Ecole Supérieure de Commerce de Paris, a Master’s Degree in Marketing and Strategy from the University Paris-IX Dauphine and a Master’s Degree in Art History from the University Paris-I Sorbonne.

Marie is in charge of curating the collection of the Goulandris Foundation, which includes works by Paul Cézanne, Edgar Degas, Claude Monet, Henri de Toulouse-Lautrec, Auguste Rodin, Vincent van Gogh, Paul Gauguin, Pierre Bonnard, Pablo Picasso, Georges Braque, Joan Miró, Wassily Kandinsky, Paul Klee, Jackson Pollock, Alberto Giacometti, Francis Bacon, etc. as well as major Greek modern and contemporary artists.

Marie joined the Goulandris Foundation in 2012. Before that, she used to work for Sotheby’s in New York and Christie’s in Paris. She is also in charge of curating the temporary exhibitions of the Foundation. During the past years, she has worked on the Surrealist movement and Man Ray in particular, Dimitris Mytaras, Nikos Engonopoulos and Giorgos Rorris. Marie is also the author of the catalogues dedicated to the Goulandris collection and of two children’s books: At the Museum! And The Collection of the Basil and Elise Goulandris Foundation Sticker Book.

James M. Lane is an interdisciplinary artist based in Athens, Greece. He is employing time-based media, photography, digital imaging, performance and installation. He studied film theory and acting at UMASS and Stony Brook University and earned his BFA in photography at Parsons School of Design / New School for Social Research in New York and the American University of Paris.

James M. Lane has presented his work internationally in exhibitions including The Right to Breath, Undercurrent Gallery, New York, NY, (2021), Homemade Exotica, FREIRAUM in der Box, Berlin (2019-2020), Unknown Destinations Chapter III, Athens (2019), Sarajevo International Festival 2019, Academy of Fine Arts, (two person exhibition), Forthcoming, Space 52, Athens (2018), Beauty is the Method ACG Gallery/Deree-American College of Greece, Athens (2015), Transmediale, Enclosures of Toxicity, Berlin (2015), Alluvium, Beton7 Center for the Arts, Athens (solo 2011), Symptomatic Greece, Freud’s Dreams Museum, St. Petersburg (2010), Art Athina 2003, Athens (2003), Antiphony, Ileana Tounta Contemporary Art Center, Athens (solo 2002), Toxic, DESTE Foundation, Athens (2001), ARCO Art Fair, Madrid. (1999), Intragrams, In Khan Gallery, New York, NY (solo 1998), KOPAK Public Art Consulting, Seoul (solo 1998), Intragrams, Ileana Tounta Contemporary Art Center, Athens (solo exhibition 1997). The artist’s work is in public and private collections.

Dr. Dionysis Mourelatos holds both an M.A. and PhD in Byzantine Art and Archaeology from the University of Athens. Currently, he is an Adjunct Lecturer in Medieval and European Art History at the Department of Conservation of Antiquities and Works of Art at the University of West Attica, an Adjunct Lecturer at the Postgraduate Program on "Managing the monuments: Archaeology, Urban Planning and Architecture" and an Associate Lecturer in Greek Art and Architecture at Hellenic Open University.  

In the past he has taught at the University of West Attica in the Department of Conservation of Antiquities and Works of Art, at the University of Thessaly, and at the Hellenic Open University and the Ionian University where he taught Greek Art and Architecture. Dionysis has worked for Vrijes Universiteit Amsterdam, as a national expert for Greece and Cyprus in the "Eufori study" (European Foundations for Research and Innovation), the University of Athens, the Ionian University, the Mount Sinai Foundation in Athens and the Monastery of Saint Catherine's at Sinai. He has written and presented several papers concerning mostly Sinai and the Historiography of Byzantine Art and Archaeology and was also the editor of the volume “Art and Archaeology in Byzantium and Beyond” (Oxford: British Archaeological Reports, 2021).

Dr. Alessandra Sax holds a Bachelor’s degree in Psychology and Child Development from Hampshire College (USA). She graduated from New York University (USA) with a Clinical Master’s degree in Clinical Social Work, Children, Adolescents and Adults and completed her doctoral degree in Counseling Psychology and Supervision in Counselor Education at Argosy University (USA). She has been an instructor in Clinical Interviewing and Consultation, Child Psychology, Life-Span Development, Cultural Psychology, Abnormal Psychology, Advanced Psychopathology, and Group & Music Therapy.

She is also a licensed psychotherapist who has been in private practice for over twenty-five years, working with children, adolescents and adults. From 2006 until 2019, she was working at the American Community Schools of Athens (ACS), as the Elementary School Counselor and then School Psychologist, and additionally, was the coordinator of the Psychology Intern Program within the Department of Student Affairs. She is an editorial board member and peer reviewer for the International Journal for Elementary Education for SciencePG, the American Journal of Applied Psychology and the International Journal of Progressive Education.

She has published several book chapters and articles, and regularly presents her clinical work and research at international conferences both in Europe and the USA. She is a member of EB-ACA and ACA.  At Hellenic American University Dr. Sax is an Assistant Professor and Director of the Psychology Department, including the University Counseling Center.

Dr. Katherine Schwab is Professor of Art History & Visual Culture in the Department of Visual and Performing Arts, Director of the Classical Studies Program, and Curator of the Plaster Cast Collection for the Fairfield University Art Museum, at Fairfield University in Connecticut.

A specialist in ancient Greek art and archaeology, her research focuses on the Parthenon metopes. Scans of her metope drawings are on permanent display in the Acropolis Museum. The original graphite drawings formed a traveling exhibition in the U.S., An Archaeologist’s Eye: The Parthenon Drawings of Katherine A. Schwab (2014-2018). Her publications on the Parthenon metopes appear as chapters in multi-authored volumes. Her drawings and photographs have formed three separate exhibitions at the Greek Consulate General in New York City. Most recently she has served as a scholarly consultant concerning the Parthenon metopes for the Virtual Reality project, Athens Reborn: Acropolis, made by www.flyoverzone.com (May 2022).

Dr. Schwab has also explored the meaning of the Caryatids’ hairstyles on the Athenian Acropolis. She directed a film, The Caryatid Hairstyling Project (2009), and collaborated with her colleague Dr. Marice Rose including a book chapter in The Cultural History of Hair in Antiquity, and an exhibition, Hair in the Classical World, at the Fairfield University Art Museum (2015). Both Drs. Schwab and Rose were consulted by a New York Times journalist in October 2021 for an article on a TikTok hairstyle trending among young men.

Dr. Faye Tzanetoulakou is an Art Historian / Art Critic / Exhibition Curator. She holds a PhD in Contemporary Art History from the Department of History at the Faculty of Philosophy of the Aristotle University of Thessaloniki, and is conducting postdoctoral research at the University of Thessaly. Her academic topic of interest is the Contemporary Sublime. She studied Art History at the University of Glasgow, and she teaches Social Function of Art, and Art and Materiality at the University of West Attica.

She is the General Secretary to the Board of the Greek section of the International Association of Art Critics AICA. She is the Arts Editor of the cultural website culturenow.gr, and has written art reviews for a variety of international and Greek publications. She has curated several art exhibitions, while organising and participating in various art conferences in Greece. She is an environmental activist.