Christiana Galanopoulou

Christiana Galanopoulou is an art historian, independent curator and festival artistic director. She lives in Athens and works as an independent curator, as a dramaturge, author of texts on art and publications editor. She holds a PhD on Art History and Theory from the University of Athens. She studied Archaeology and Art History at the University of Athens (BA), and she holds an MA in Curating and Gallery Studies from Essex University and a DEA (Master 2) in Contemporary Art History from Paris I Panthéon-Sorbonne. She made her post-graduate studies thanks to a bursary from the Greek State Bursaries Foundation (IKY).

As an independent curator she has collaborated with public and private institutions, art centres and festivals in Greece and abroad (Thessaloniki International Film Festival, Kalamata International Dance Festival, Arts Council of England-Dance Screen – Brighton, Kiasma Museum of Contemporary Art – Helsinki, Moderna Dansteatern-Stockholm, Experimental Cinema Festival – Cyprus,, Latitiudes Contemporaines-Lille, Belluard Bollwerk Festival – Fribourg, Switzerland, Museum of Contemporary Art of Sczetzin – Poland et al.) 

In 2000 she founded VideoDance, a festival on movement and the moving image, which she directed until 2007 under the auspices of the Thessaloniki International Film Festival. VideoDance was the first international interdisciplinary festival in Greece and it shaped a new perception of independent interdisciplinary festivals and a new scene of experiment with performing arts and audiovisual media with a huge impact in young audiences. In this framework in 2001 she founded project|exchange, (2001-2007) the only funding scheme for the production of audiovisual dance works which has ever existed in Greece which finally produced 20 works.

In 2008 she founded MIRfestival, and independent international interdisciplinary festival about new forms of performing arts, of which she is the artistic director until today.

MIR presents inventive artistic work at the meeting point of the arts, inviting artists with a personal idiom from Greece and the international scene, to make works which interact in an original way with the political and social reality of Athens, activating unusual spaces and bringing to light its underground artistic forces. 

Christiana Galanopoulou has commissioned and produced artistic work by artists, collectives and groups for the festivals she has founded and directs and for other institutions and networks and through them she has activated the public space and the public dialogue on art. She is a member of international networks for the co-production and co-diffusion of performing arts (Open Latitudes, Festivals of the Future, Time for Live Art) and has co-produced works by Greek and foreign artists internationally.  Her contribution to the production of artistic work has taken many forms: as a creator she has presented two lecture-performances (Onassis Foundation Library, Experimental Stage of the National Theatre), as a dramaturg she has collaborated with theatre and dance groups (Vasistas, Amorphy, Yelp, etc. and as a curator she has curated important exhibitions in galleries and other art spaces and has worked as a mentor in professional development programmes (INFRA – France, Watch and Talk - Switzerland etc.).

Her curatorial work focuses on the emergence of new forms of performing arts and on the intersection between contemporary audio-visual culture and performance. Her academic research interests focus on contemporary forms of performing arts as agents of a poetical and politically conscious citizenship.

She has published many texts on art, edited books and publications of cultural institutions and has participated with papers in international conferences on contemporary performing arts and on the cultural policy on dance, which she has been actively serving since 2008. She has served as Vice President of the Dance Advisory Committee of the National Centre for Theatre and Dance (2008-2010) as well as Vice President (2017-2019) and President (2019-2021) of the Dance Advisory Committee of the Ministry of Culture.