Our Team, our Curators and the Jury

Eleni Mouzakiti
Curator / Jury

  • Eleni Mouzakiti (PhD) is an Athens based photographer, educator, researcher and curator of photographic exhibitions and publications. She is the artistic director of the WomensPhotoFestival and the Photopolis Photography Festival in Greece and curator at House of Lucie Athens. She is a founding member of The Provinces, a platform that collects and promotes photographic projects that deal with the Greek periphery. (www.the-provinces.com)

    Eleni has taught photography at the Department of Visual Arts and Art Sciences of the Ioannina University, Greece, the Hellenic Center for Photography, the Athens School of Fine Arts and in the MA Program in Photography and Visual Language of AKTO College / Middlesex University, UK.

    Her photographic work has been presented in solo and group exhibitions and festivals internationally. Her works are in the collections of the Portland Museum of Art, Oregon, USA, the Thessaloniki Museum of Photography, the State Museum of Contemporary Art in Greece, the ACG Art Collection and other private collections.

    As a curator she coordinated the production and curated numerous solo and group photography exhibitions including her role as a guest curator for the international photography awards “Best of Show” exhibition.

    Eleni has participated as a jury member and/or portfolio reviewer for FUTURES, the Photopolis Agrinio Photo Festival and IPA awards.

Thalia Vrachopoulos
Curator / Jury

  • Thalia Vrachopoulos, Ph.D. is a professor of art history with a concentration in Modern Art and a non-related minor in Asian Art. Besides teaching art history at John Jay she is a very active curator. She has served as a curator for over one hundred national and international exhibitions accompanied by scholarly catalogues.

    Dr. Vrachopoulos is a full-time professor of the visual arts at John Jay College of Criminal Justice of the City University of New York. She has written scholarly essays and reviews for NYArts Magazine, Visual Culture AD, Part, +-0 , Public Art, Art in Culture, Art in Asia and Sculpture and has been included in many international panels.

    Dr. Vrachopoulos recently co-authored a book on Hilla Rebay, the founder of the Guggenheim Museum, which was released in December 2005 by the Edwin Mellen Research Press. Dr. Vrachopoulos’ contributions have been recorded and have become a permanent part of the Yale Library collection of Accomplished Women in the Arts.

Penelope Petsini
Curator / Jury

  • Penelope Petsini is Assistant Professor at the Department of Photography and Audiovisual Arts, University of West Attica.

    She studied Photography in Athens and UK (University of London, Goldsmiths College –MA in Image and Communication; University of Derby –PhD) sponsored by the State Scholarship Foundation (I.K.Y.). She has exhibited and published extensively both in Greece and internationally.

    She curated a series of photography and visual art exhibitions, the most recent being “Another Life: Human Flows | Unknown Odysseys” (Thessaloniki Museum of Photography, 2016) and “Sites of Memory” (Benaki Museum, Athens, 2016). She also curated Photobiennale 2018, that is two international group exhibitions at the Museum of Photography and the Center of Contemporary Art/ MOMus entitled Capitalist Realism: Future Perfect | Past Continuous (2018 - 2019, Thessaloniki), and the eponymous book.

    She also co-curated the major historical exhibition "(Her)stories: photographic practices, 1974-2024" presented at MOMus-Centre for Experimental Arts and MOMus- Thessaloniki Museum of Photography, as well as the eponymous book. Recent publications also include Sites of Memory: Photography, Collective Memory and History (2016); the collective readers Censorship in Greece (2016) and Companion of Censorship in Greece: Weak Democracy, Dictatorship, Metapolitefsi (2018) co-edited with Dimitris Christopoulos; as well as Photography and collective identities: Greek Photography Studies I (2021) and Photography and the anthropological turn: Greek Photography Studies II (2023) co-edited with John Stathatos.

Nina Kassianou
Curator

  • Nina Kassianou is a Historian & Photography Critic, Curator of contemporary photography and historical exhibitions and publications in Greece and abroad with extensive participation in international festivals as a portfolio reviewer.

    She holds a PhD on ''The Greek Civil War (1946=1949) through published photographs in the Press” from Panteion University of Athens. Nina has been a fellow at Princeton University in the USA to research photographic archives relating to the Greek Civil War.

    She has participated as a Portfolio Reviewer in many festivals in Europe, such as PhotoEspana, SiFest Savignano, Fotofo Bratislava, Fotografia Europea Reggio Emilia, Fotofestiwal Lodz, Hamburg Triennial, Braga- Portugal- Encontros da Imagem, Colorno-Italy- Photolife, Thessaloniki Photobiennale, IPA awards.

    Nina has collaborated with the Photography Center of Skopelos, and the Thessaloniki Museum of Photography (for more than 10 years), with various galleries based in Athens and exhibition venues throughout Greece and was the artistic director of the gallery M55projects in Athens.

    She has curated more than 100 exhibitions of well-known artists and numerous publications of photographic books. She has authored numerous academic essays, published articles on the history of Greek and European Photography in prestigious publications and has participated as a speaker in international forums. For the last four years she has been in charge of Photography at DL and ENIA Gallery in Piraeus and at EIKASTIKOS KYKLOS Gallery in Athens.

    Nina organizes and curates the Artist’s Residency RETURN2ITHACA Program in Ithaca, inviting artists to be inspired by the universal values of the Odyssey.

Olga Stefatou
 Jury

  • Olga Stefatou is a photographer, mentor, curator, and collections consultant based in Athens, Greece.

    In her practice, she investigates the idea of freedom and its connection to geopolitics, heritage, and social structures, with a special interest in gender issues and women’s rights. Olga’s work has been exhibited internationally at institutions and art spaces including the Aga Khan Museum (Canada), Doha Fire Station Art Space (Qatar), MOMus Museum of Contemporary Art (Greece), Benaki Museum (Greece), Los Angeles Month of Photography, Head On Photo Festival (Australia), Les Boutographies (France), Negpos Gallery (France), Synthesis Gallery (Bulgaria) and Photon Gallery (Slovenia) among others. In 2024, her work A Pair of Brand New Eyes was nominated for the Leica Oskar Barnack award.

    Stefatou has extensive experience in multimedia journalism, having collaborated with international media outlets such as Der Spiegel, Die Zeit, The Economist, NBC News, and Vanity Fair. In 2015, she documented the pioneering Solar Impulse mission - the first round-the-world flight powered entirely by solar energy.

    Her past consultancy work includes a collaboration with Qatar Museums for the 2023 Tasweer Photo Festival and its permanent photography collection, 2018-2020. From 2014 to 2022, she served as the creative director of the Saristra Festival arts program on Cephalonia Island, Greece.

    She studied Photography at the University of West Attica and completed her master’s degree in Multimedia Journalism at the University of Bolton (2012), based in Beijing. She currently teaches documentary photography at AKTO College.

    Her creative space, atelier délos, located in Athens, serves as a hub for artistic expression - fostering creativity, collaboration, and community around photography and audiovisual arts.

    https://olgastefatou.com/

Maria Papanikolaou
Jury / Curator

  • Maria Papanikolaou is an artist, researcher and educator in the field of fine arts.

     

    She studied law at Athens University (State Scholarship Foundation, 2000) and sculpture at Royal Academy of Art in The Netherlands (Huygens Scholarship, 2008). Maria holds an MFA degree (2011) and a PhD (2022) from ASFA, and was also awarded scholarships from Onassis Foundation, Foundation for Education & European Culture and Leventis Foundation. During the academic year 2016-2017 she carried out research in New York as a Fulbright scholar. In 2018 she was an Artworks fellow and in 2015 she won the Open Call Prize at B3 Biennial of Moving Image (Frankfurt). 

     

    Her latest solo show, titled Free From What (exhibited at annexM of Athens Concert Hall) was curated by Anna Kafetsi and included 6 new works. She has held solo shows in the Netherlands, at Expodium (2007) and Filmhuis den Haag (2008) and has participated in group exhibitions, including: Still Here Tomorrow, Stavros Niarchos Foundation (2019), Athens Adhocracy, Onassis Cultural Centre (2015), Expanded Senses, Museum Applied Arts, Frankfurt (2015), Afresh: A New Generation of Greek Artists, National Museum of Contemporary Art Athens (2013).

Marlena Kaloudi
Project manager

  • Marlena is a bilingual professional with expertise in digital project management and localization.

    She served as Digital Project Manager at OLIVER Agency and Commit Global for several years, coordinating content implementation across all european markets to deliver seamless multilingual digital experiences.

    Previously she contributed at Microsoft, where she strengthened her skills in global-scale workflows and cross-functional digital ecosystem coordination.

    She studied Translation and Localisation Project Management and her background also includes freelance translation, market interpretation and localisation services specializing in advertising and legal compliance.

Galatea Kossiori
Social Media

  • Galatea is a multidisciplinary creative exploring the meeting point between art, design, and technology. A graduate of the Experimental Music High School of Pallini, she developed an early sensitivity to rhythm, structure, and collaboration. After two years of design studies, she expanded her visual language through the Fredric Roberts Photography Workshop, shaping a narrative eye that connects people and ideas. Later, she held a position at the House of Lucie.

    Today, as a Product and Systems Design Engineering student at the Aegean Polytechnic School, Galatea merges analytical thinking with artistic experimentation, designing systems and experiences that reflect empathy, precision, and a curiosity for how aesthetics can improve daily life.