elc team
The Athens Biennale enters a new phase: it transforms, expands, and strengthens, adopting a renewed governance structure that includes a Board of Trustees, an Advisory Board, and a Curatorial Committee. This new architecture brings together leading figures from the fields of art, culture, intellectual life and entrepreneurship, working toward a shared vision. Poka-Yio, co-founder of the Athens Biennale, remains Executive and Artistic Director, ensuring continuity in both strategic direction and artistic vision.
Twenty years after its founding in 2005 as an independent initiative, the Athens Biennale continues to redefine the role of cultural institutions. Originally aiming to place Athens on the international map of contemporary art, it has evolved into one of Europe’s most dynamic platforms for contemporary culture. Through innovative curatorial practices, support for artistic experimentation and active participation in international discourse, the Athens Biennale has established a strong presence-further recognised with the Princess Margriet Award for Culture from the European Cultural Foundation (2015).
Today, it proposes a new operational model: not as a static institution, but as a collective, evolving ecosystem. In a cultural environment often marked by introversion and competition, it advocates an alternative model: collaborative, sustainable, and outward-looking. From Athens, a city restless, contradictory, alive, the Biennale continues to raise questions that cannot wait.
Photo by Pinelopi Gerasimou
A New Governance Architecture
The Board of Trustees, chaired by George Economou and Dakis Joannou, assumes strategic oversight, ensuring the organisation’s long-term sustainability, institutional development and cultural impact.
Founding Members of the Board of Trustees:
Alexia Antsakli Vardinoyanni, founder of ARTFLYER
Magda Baltoyanni-Kallitsantsi, collector
Dimitris Daskalopoulos, collector of contemporary art, custodian of the D. Daskalopoulos Collection, Greece, and founder of NEON | Organization for Culture and Development
Harry David, collector of Contemporary African and African Diaspora Art (The Harry David Art Collection)
Alexandros Diogenous, entrepreneur, collector, founder of Pylon Art & Culture
George Economou, entrepreneur and art collector (co-chair)
Füsun Eczacıbaşı, architect, art collector, and patron of the arts (honorary member)
Mareva Grabowski-Mitsotakis, creative consultant, entrepreneur
Dakis Joannou, businessman, collector, founder and president of the DESTE Foundation for Contemporary Art (co-chair)
Irene Panagopoulos, collector and cultural advocate based in Greece
Ninetta Vafia, lawyer and art collector
The Advisory Board operates as a think tank, strengthening the organisation’s strategic development and international reach.
Members of the Advisory Board:
Elina Kountouri, director of NEON | Organization for Culture and Development D. Daskalopoulos
Dimitris Koutsopoulos, CEO of Deloitte Greece
Thomas Oberender, Berlin and Athens-based curator, festival maker and writer
Chloe Vaitsou, independent art advisor and cultural strategist
Yerassimos Yannopoulos, co-managing partner, Zepos & Yannopoulos
The Curatorial Committee is established for the first time, introducing a new model of curatorial process. In collaboration with Poka-Yio, it recommends the curator of each edition and contributes to shaping the artistic programme. The 8th Athens Biennale Curatorial Committee consists of Massimiliano Gioni, Katerina Gregos, Stefanie Hessler, and Gabi Ngcobo.
Thiago de Paula Souza appointed curator of the 8th Athens Biennale
Following the proposal of the Curatorial Committee, the Board of Trustees has appointed Thiago de Paula Souza as curator of the 8th Athens Biennale, to take place in Spring 2027.
Thiago de Paula Souza is a curator based in São Paulo. He is interested in exhibition making and in the possibilities that the format continues to offer for fostering political imaginaries. In recent years, he has explored ideas and artistic practices that regard the notion of transmutation as a central element, whether through eroticism, gender nonconformity and modes of intimacy, as well as through the transformation of organic matter and spiritual trance. He believes these practices might contribute to rethinking more balanced forms of coexistence between humanity and other beings.
His curatorial activity includes: co-curator of the 36th Bienal de São Paulo (2025), co-curator of the 38th Panorama da Arte Brasileira at MAM São Paulo (2024); co-curator of Some May Work as Symbols: Art Made in Brazil, 1950s–70s, at Raven Row, London (2024); co-curator of the Nomadic Program at the Vleeshal Center for Contemporary Art, Netherlands (2022–2023); co-curator of While we are embattled at Para Site, Hong Kong, and Atos de Revolta at MAM Rio, Brazil (2022); member of the curatorial team of the 3rd edition of Frestas – Trienal de Artes, in São Paulo, Brazil (2020–2021); curatorial advisor for the 58th Carnegie International, United States (2021/2022); curator of Tony Cokes’s first solo exhibition in the Netherlands, at BAK, Utrecht (2018–2019); and a member of the curatorial team of the 10th Berlin Biennale (2018).
He currently serves on the Artistic Committee of NESR Art Foundation in Angola. Thiago de Paula Souza is a PhD candidate in the arts program at HDK-Valand – Academy of Art and Design at the University of Gothenburg, Sweden. His research examines artistic practices that combine refusal and collaboration as tools against neoliberal cooptation.
