He has directed the 12-episode documentary series Lighthouses (2016-17) for Cosmote History channel, a major satellite Greek broadcaster. Orfeas also directs concept videos for cultural institutions and design agencies, which have been featured at the Benaki Museum, Stavros Niarchos Cultural Centre, Onassis Stegi and the Athens Concert Hall. In 2016, he completed Into the Centre of the Wheel, his first feature documentary, which premiered at the Thessaloniki Documentary Festival and was acquired for Cinema and TV distribution from Athens-based Neo Films.
His short films have received top prize from the Panhellenic Association of Film Critics and premiered at the Oscar-qualifying Zinebi International Festival of Documentary and Short Film Bilbao, Spain, while he has won a short film pitch award by the Athens International Film Festival. His graduation film, Small Talk (2007), won a Royal Television Society Award in the UK and was awarded first prize at the Drama International Short Film Festival in Greece.
He has studied psychology in Scotland. In 2004, he moved to England to study Film and video at the University for the Creative Arts and Screenwriting at the London Film School (2008). He is a 2019 Berlinale Talent Alumni.
Kostis Charamountanis is a film director born in 1994 in Athens, Greece. He has directed five films in total, the most acclaimed being Kioku Before Summer Comes (2018) and the most recent Anthology of a Butterfly (2020). Ηe is presently working on the script of his debut feature film, Kyuka Journeying to the Moon through the Endless Sea, which earned him a place at the MIDPOINT Feature Launch 2020 at the beginning of the year.
Dimitris Anagnostou was born in 1984. He studied Chemistry at the National and Kapodistrian University of Athens and filmmaking at the Stavrakos Film and Television School in Athens; at the University Paris 1 Sorbonne; and at the University Paris 3 Sorbonne Nouvelle, with a scholarship from the Greek State Scholarship Foundation (I.K.Y).
Since 2016, he teaches the courses The Aesthetics of Cinema and Theory of Montage at Stavrakos Film and Television School.
His first short film, Mare Nostrum (2020) had its world premiere at the international competition section of the Vienna Shorts International Short Film Festival. He is currently completing the production of the short film Lumen, directed by Eirini Tzoulia, and preparing his second short film, Atopia.
Born in Athens in 1979, Yannis Veslemes studied film. He has directed feature films, shorts, music videos and tv adverts. In 2014, his feature debut Norway premièred at Karlovy Vary before screening at dozens of festivals and securing distribution deals all around the world. Within Greece, the film won a series of distinctions (five Hellenic Film Academy Awards), and enjoyed a successful run in cinemas, reintroducing Greek audiences to midnight screenings. In 2018, he was invited by the American production company Drafthouse Films to take part in the feature-length anthology The Field Guide to Evil (produced by Tim League & Ant Timpson), which premièred at South by Southwest and was distributed in the US by N.EO.N.(theaters) and Universal (home video). He is currently in pre-production for his first English-language film, She Loved Blossoms More (with which he participated in Sundance Lab Istanbul). As a composer (Felizol) he has released records on many international labels (Optimo Music, Byrd Out, Invisible Inc and Inner Ear) and has composed soundtracks for numerous films (including Tale 52, Wednesday 04:45, Norway, Suntan, Thread, Cosmic Candy, Third Kind, Electric Swan). He is a member of the Hellenic Film Academy and a curator of The Lost Highway of Greek Cinema club.
Phaedra Vokali graduated (with distinction) from the Marketing and Communication Department of the Athens University of Economic and Business in 2005 and in 2008 she obtained an MA in Film Studies from University College London, where she studied under a scholarship from the Greek State Scholarship Foundation (I.K.Y. ). In 2009, she attended the MA program Research in Architecture: Architectural Design – Space – Culture in the School of Architecture of the National Technical University of Athens (NTUA). Before entering the production terrain, she has worked in distribution as a buyer. She has also worked as head of programming of the Athens International Film Festival, and editor-in-chief of Cinema Magazine, the only film magazine in Greece. She has been working as a producer in Marni Films since October 2013 and she is an alumnus of the EAVE Producers Network and the Torino Film Lab Lab (Script & Pitch, Framework). Her first feature film production, Suntan by Argyris Papadimitropoulos, was awarded Best International Feature Film in Edinburgh International Film Festival and was nominated for the 2016 LUX prize as well as selected for the 2016 European Film Awards. It also landed in IndieWire’s list of 20 best films of 2016 from around the world. Her second feature, Afterlov, by Stergios Paschos, premiered in Locarno 2016 where it received the Best Film Award by the Youth Jury, while it has also won prizes at the Thessaloniki International Film Festival, Transilvania International Film Festival and elsewhere. She is currently editing the first short film she has written and directed, entitled Enomena.
Vasilis Chrysanthopoulos is the co-founder and head producer of the Greek production company PLAYS2PLACE. His work is dedicated to developing and producing original, imaginative stories addressed to international audiences, with a special focus on discovering and promoting new talents and pioneering voices. His credits include the award-winning festival hit Miss Violence (Silver Lion for Best Director and Coppa Volpi for Best Actor at Venice International Film Festival 2013). Vasilis is a member of EAVE, EDN and Cannes Producers Network. He is an alumnus of the training initiatives EAVE Producers, EAVE Marketing, EAVE B’est, MFI Script 2 Film, MIDPOINT TV Launch and MIDPOINT Cold Open, and has participated in more than 30 film co-production and pitching events. He has received more than 20 development and production awards for his film and TV projects, including the MIDPOINT C21 Award, which he won as an emerging European TV series producer during Sarajevo International Film Festival’s Industry Days 2017. In August 2019, the international magazine Screen International featured his profile in its article ‘Five producers to know from Southeast Europe’. Since 2020, Vasilis is a faculty member of ANT1 Scriptwriting School in Greece, where he teaches production for films and TV series.
Nefeli is a dancer based in Athens. In 2015 she graduated with honours from the Greek National School of Dance (KSOT) in Athens. As a member of the Hellenic Dance Company (2013-2016), she performed, among others, in pieces by Martha Graham and Tono Lachky. Between 2015 and 2016, as a member of the Bodhi project of the Salzburg Experimental Academy of Dance (SEAD), she danced in pieces by Etienne Guilloteau, Eldad Ben Sasson, Juxtapoz (Paul Blackman and Christine Gouzelis), Sita Ostheimer, and Mark Lorimer at various festivals across Europe, as well as in New York and Israel. Choreographers she has worked with include: Ian Kaler, Andonis Foniadakis, Konstantinos Rigos, Iris Karayan, Anastasia Valsamaki, Dimitrios Mytilinaios, Hubert Lepka (Lawine Torren), Etienne Guilloteau, Markela Manoliadi, Xenia Koghilaki and Giorgos Sioras Deligiannis. In 2017, her duet WHEREISYOURSISTER showed in Schmiede Festival (Hallein) and in Raw Matters (Vienna). In 2018, her participatory performance Let me serve you, created in collaboration with Ioanna Gerakidi, was included in the programme of the Athens and Epidaurus Festival, as part of the pop-up event The Performance Shop.
Anastasia Valsamaki graduated with honors from the Greek National School of Dance (KSOT) and made her debut as a young choreographer with the performance Sync in 2016, with which she was selected from the Aerowaves network as one of the 20 most promising emerging choreographers in Europe for 2017. Sync was then performed at the Spring Forward 17 festival in Denmark and at the Athens & Epidaurus Festival. In the context of her postgraduate choreographic studies (International Choreographic Exchange programme) at the Salzburg Experimental Academy of Dance (SEAD), she choreographed Aether for the New Faces New Dances festival (2017) in Salzburg, the duet Dimensions of a memory, as well as the performance By the means of a Body based on the work of Nevin Aladag Five Stones Game at the Salzburger Kunstverein. In 2018 she collaborated with the National Theatre of Greece as a movement advisor in the production of Peer Gynt and choreographed Body Monologue as part of the Arc For Dance festival. As a dancer she has performed works by Martha Graham and Anton Lachky for the Hellenic Dance Company and collaborated with several choreographers such as Millicent Hodson & Kenneth Archer, Mina Ananiadou, Kyriaki Nasioula and Stella Fotiadi. In 2020, she created DisJoint for the 7th Young Choreographers Festival by Onassis Foundation. She continues to create, perform and teach contemporary dance.
Danae Dimitriadi is a graduate of the Greek National School of Dance (KSOT). As a member of the Hellenic Dance Company, she performed in pieces by Akram Khan and Martha Graham and took part in Anton Lachky’s creation No More Fairytales. In 2014, she collaborated with Martha Graham Company for the Panorama project, which was presented at the New York City Hall and Odeon of Herodes Atticus in Athens. Between 2016 and 17, in the context of a collaboration with the ZfinMalta Dance Ensemble, she had the chance to perform with several artists such as Mavin Khoo, Jose Agudo, Ivan Perez and others. Since 2015, Danae and her fellow choreographer Dionysios Alamanos have been working together on a variety of different projects, including the choreographies UNCIA and ATMA, which they have performed in festivals and theatres around Europe, Asia and Latin America. With these two productions, the duo has entered competitions and won prizes in the Netherlands and in Germany. Their latest work, Free At Last, was produced by Theater Rotterdam and will soon start touring in more than 30 theatres in the Netherlands. As part of her ongoing collaboration with Dionysios Alamanos, she also runs workshops all around the world and creates works for professional dance schools and other companies.
Irini Kalaitzidi is a dance and computational artist. Her practise is situated within the field of Technoscience while exploring the space in-between human and nonhuman, physical and digital, familiar and uncanny dancing bodies. She studied at the Greek National School of Dance (2018) and graduated (w/ distinction) from the ΜΑ Computational Arts Department of Goldsmiths University of London (2019). She has presented her works in Athens (Pistachios, Arc 2016) and London (mic | amplify the body and Within the Vibrant Assemblage, St. James Church, Goldsmiths 2019). Following her latter work, she was invited to talk at Somerset House on Art and Artificial Intelligence (Human Data Interaction, 2019). Among other labs, she has participated at the Choreographic Coding Lab, organised by Motion Bank, Fiber and the International Choreographic Arts Center (ICK) Amsterdam (Dansmakers, 2019). She has performed in productions of the Athens & Epidaurus Festival and at Megaron Concert Hall in Athens and has collaborated as an assistant choreographer with Patricia Apergi for the productions Alcestis (Athens & Epidaurus Festival, 2017) and Primary Fact (Onassis Cultural Centre, 2018). For the period 2020-21, Irini is in residency at Kinono (Tinos, 2020) and ICST Zhdk in the research area of Immersive Arts (Zurich, 2020).
She is based in Athens, Tinos and London.
Born in Athens in 1989, Ioannis Michos studied in the Greek National School of Dance (KSOT) and in P.A.R.T.S in Brussels, where he was taught repertories from Anne Teresa De Keersmaeker, Pina Bausch, William Forsythe, Wim Vandekeybus and Trisha Brown. In 2009 he collaborated with Dimitris Papaioannou as a performer in Nowhere at the National Theatre of Greece. Between 2012 and 2016, he lived in France where he worked with Philippe Decouflé. In 2017 he returned to Greece to collaborate for the second time with Dimitris Papaioannou in the project The Great Tamer, which was presented internationally at Festival d’Avignon, BAM’s Next Wave Festival, Dance Umbrella, Théâtre de la Ville in Paris and other venues. More recently, he danced in Babel and in the revival of Rite of Spring by Konstantinos Rigos and worked as assistant director to Konstaninos Rigos for projects presesented at the Greek National Opera, as well as a choreographer for various theater pieces.
Ioanna is a researcher and curator. Her work focuses on digital and networked ecologies as well as on contemporary visual culture. Her PhD research, funded by the Arts and Humanities Research Council, the State Scholarships Foundation (I.K.Y.), and A.G. Leventis Foundation, was an embedded ethnography conducted at Tate Modern, which explored the contemporary art museum’s understanding(s) of digital and network culture. Ioanna also holds a BA degree in Media and Culture from the National and Kapodistrian University of Athens and an MA degree in Digital Culture and Technology from the Department of Digital Humanities, King’s College London. She has held positions in several organisations and institutions in the UK and in Greece, for example The Photographers’ Gallery, the Royal National Theatre, London South Bank University, The Royal College of Art and the Athens Biennale, while she was a member of the Connectiva curatorial collective.
She currently works as an independent curator and as an associate researcher in the Centre of New Media & Feminist Public Practices at the Department of Architecture, University of Thessaly. She is also the editor of unthinking.photography, the online platform of The Photographers’ Gallery digital programme, and a research associate at the Centre for the Study of the Networked Image based at London South Bank University.
Vassilia Kaga is a queer, feminist curator, producer and performer. Their multidimensional work attempts to challenge the normative, especially heteronormative, white dominant structures and mentalities incorporated into the network of art relations as well as the wider public sphere. They hold a BA Degree in Communication, Media and Culture with a specialisation in Cultural Management from Panteion University of Social and Political Sciences in Athens. Ever since obtaining their degree, they have contributed to several artistic projects in Greece, Germany and Sweden, the majority of which were ran by collectives and mainly aimed at highlighting marginalized artistic perspectives. In 2017, they launched Aye mari, an exhibition series exploring queer curating as a practice capable of lending a voice to those who have been excluded from the master narratives of art. They are one of the founding members of Failing Femmes, a group aspiring to create an autonomous support network for LGBTQI+ creators. Vassilia Kaga’s need to curate exhibitions originates from a utopian desire intertwining with their queer identity. In this context, however, utopia is nothing more than the need to heal collective traumas caused by an ostensibly functioning system.
Klea Charitou is an art historian and curator based in Athens. After completing her BA in Greek Literature from the National and Kapodistrian University of Athens, she obtained a Master’s degree in the History of Art from Aristotle University of Thessaloniki and a second Master’s in Curating from the University of Rennes in France. Currently, she is studying towards a PhD at the Athens School of Fine Arts (ASFA), preparing a thesis entitled The Relationship Between Logos and Art in the Greek Art of the 1970s. She has worked as a curatorial assistant for documenta 14 and was part of the curatorial team for Kunsthalle Athena. Other curatorial highlights include: South as a State of Mind magazine; This Is Not My Beautiful House (Kunsthalle Athena); and Cady Noland Unauthorized, (University Rennes 2 and FRAC Bretagne). In 2018, she co-founded “miss dialectic”, an art operator that aims to support artistic and curatorial research with a strong focus on education and the production of new work through interdisciplinary collaborations.
Ionian Bisai (1992) is a visual artist and filmmaker based in Athens. He graduated from the Athens School of Fine Arts (2018). His artistic research focuses on the critical reading of underexposed stories and examines the ways in which these become embedded in new contexts. Fully endorsing the age of augmented reality, the artist weaves social engagement and critique through participatory strategies and performative sequences, resulting in hybrid films and video installations. In 2016, in the context of his long-term artistic collaboration with Sotiris Tsiganos, he founded the Latent Community project, an ongoing artistic investigation intertwining fieldwork and moving image in order to tackle contemporary judicial, social and ecological issues. The duo aims to create conceptual and emotional experiences through which a more equal and sustainable future may be imagined. Their work has been presented in several international exhibitions and festivals (Athens Biennale, documenta14 – Public Programs, Thessaloniki Documentary Festival, Polyeco Contemporary Art Initiative, Museum of Contemporary Art of Crete and the Recontemporary cultural association in Turin). Ionian Bisai and Sotiris Tsiganos have been awarded prizes by the LOOP artistic platform in Barcelona and Sharjah Art Foundation (United Arabic Emirates). For the period 2020-2021, they are fellows of Onassis AiR – School of Infinite Rehearsals.
Alexandra Niaka is an interactive media artist. She holds a Master of Architecture in Design for Performance and Interaction from the Bartlett School of Architecture (UCL) and a diploma of architecture from Aristotle University of Thessaloniki. She expresses herself through interactive installations, immersive technologies, and written text. Through her work, she tries to provide creative answers to questions concerning the relation between human and technology and explore the way in which this relation determines how we perceive, and interact with, our surrounding reality. To that end, she focuses on the use of cutting-edge technology to create Mixed, Virtual and Augmented Reality experiences. Her research focuses on theories of consciousness and perception and she tries to render visible intangible concepts like the brain processes that occur during perceptual experiences. Her work is based on the biofeedback loop between brain data and the surrounding reality. Her main experimentation tool is the EEG headset. She has worked for London- based creative studios, like The Workers (inc.) and Jason Bruges studio.
Janis Rafa completed her education in Fine Art at the University of Leeds (2002-2012) with a PhD in video art and was a resident at the Rijksakademie (2013-2014) with a scholarship by Onassis Foundation. She has been awarded the Stavros Niarchos Foundation Artist Fellowship by ARTWORKS (2020).In 2020 she was commissioned for a new video work by Fondazione In Between Art Film for the project Mascarilla 19: Codes of Domestic Violence. In 2019 she presented her first museum solo at Centraal Museum in Utrecht. Her feature fiction film, Kala azar (2020), had its world premiere in the International Film Festival Rotterdam (KNF award), a US premiere at New Directors/ New Films at MoMA (New York, 2020), followed by an international festival run (25 festivals, 5 wins) and a Dutch cinema release (2020).
Rafa’s works have also been shown at MAXXI (Rome, 2020), State of Concept (Athens, 2020), Manifesta 12 (Palermo, 2018), Palazzo Medici Riccardi (Florence, 2017), Centre d’art Contemporain Chanot (France, 2017), Kunsthalle Munster (Germany, 2017), Museum Voorlinden (2017), EYE Filmmuseum (Amsterdam, 2016), Palazzo Strozzi (2015), State Museum Thessaloniki (Greece, 2011), amongst other venues. Rafa’s works are in collections of the Dutch museums
Stedelijk, Centraal, Voorlinden and part of Fondazione In Between Art Film (Italy).
Antigone studied architecture at the National Technical University of Athens (2005) and Fine Arts at the Athens School of Fine Arts (2009) and at Central Saint Martins College, University of the Arts London. She holds an MA in Visual Arts from the Royal School of Arts (KASK) in Ghent, Belgium (2014). She has participated in exhibitions and festivals in Belgium, Germany, Greece and other countries, where she contributed visual works and performances and ran a series of workshops. She has also been selected for a number of residency programmes in Belgium (Workspacebrussels, Kaaistudios, Air Antwerpen, Recyclart Brussels). In 2017 she returned to her native Greece and she now lives and works in Athens. Alongside her artistic activity, she has been teaching art to various age groups in diverse contexts since 2009. In her work she combines many different media such as performance, video, drawing, photography and installation art, investigating the manifold ways in which we perceive the concepts of place, space and time that shape our identity.
Ventourakis’ practice situates itself at the threshold between art and document, constituting an attempt to interrogate the status of the photographic image. In 2013, he completed the MA in Fine Art (Photography, with distinction) at Central Saint Martins, University of the Arts London (UAL) and was also the recipient of the Deutsche Bank Award in Photography (2013), awarded to a UAL final-year student. His work has been selected for a number of initiatives showcasing the work of promising and top graduating artist in the UK, such as the Future Map exhibition (2013); Catlin Guide (2014); and the exhibition Fresh Faced Wild Eyed at the Photographers Gallery (2014). In 2015 he was a visiting artist at California Institute of the Arts with a Fulbright Artist Fellowship, while in 2016 he was a fellow in IdeasCity Athens, an initiative organized by the New Museum of New York. He was shortlisted for the MAC International award (2016) and the Bar-Tur Photobook Award (2015). His work has recently been presented on the occasion of the following exhibitions and festivals: The Same River Twice (Athens, Benaki Museum, 2019); Hors Pistes 14 (Centre Georges Pompidou, Paris, 2019); The Perfect Storm (NRW Forum, Dusseldorf, 2017); Format Photo Festival (Derby, UK, 2017); the Biennial of Young Artists from Europe and the Mediterranean (Tirana, 2017); as well as the parallel program of the Istanbul Biennale (2017). Since 2017 he is the artistic director of the Lucy Art Residency in Kavala and a co-curator of the project “A Hollow Place” in Athens.
Thanasis Neofotistos is a film director, writer and architect from Greece. He is an alumnus of the Berlinale Talents programme and Head Programmer for the International Student Competition at the Drama International Short Film Festival. His short film, Patision Avenue (13’-2018), premiered at the 75th Venice Film Festival, won 3 awards during the 41st Clermont-Ferrand International Short Film Festival (Jury, Canal+, EFA) and was selected for screening in more than 60 top-tier film festivals. His film Route-3 (13’-2019) premiered at the competition section of the 44th Toronto International Film Festival; Greek School Prayer (20’-2014) was his successful film school thesis (Golden Dionysus at Drama), while Sparkling Candles (9’-2019), his LGBTQ+ sparkling short film, premiered at the 43rd Frameline Film Festival. Currently, he is in the process of securing funds for his first-debut feature film, Peter and the Wolf, which he envisions as a dark, coming-of-age fairytale. The film is supported by the Greek Film Centre and the EU’s Media programme and has been part of important script development programmes such First-Films-First (Goethe Institute); the Mediterranean Film Institute’s (MFI) Script 2 Film workshop; and the Script Station workshop, part of the Sarajevo Talents programme. His next feature film project, “Wild Boars”, is currently in development under the auspices of Torino Film Lab and the MFI.