Christiana Galanopoulou

I have founded MIRfestival, a festival on performance/ live media/ image in 2007. It is a biennial festival of contemporary art bringing in light new forms of artistic expression. I have been its director and programme curator up to now. MIRfestival has had two extremely successful editions in 2008 and 2010. I am also running part of the production management. I direct a team of 15 collaborators.

In 2008 I was invited to help this company redesign its communication strategies and redesign its company profile through its publications and its presence in media. I was also employed as a publications editor, responsible for the content of the festival brochures, catalogue and the site. I am responsible for a team of about 15 collaborators per year. In 2011 I was invited to additionally contribute to the festival programming as an in-house artistic collaborator. In this quality I lead a research in international dance production and propose to the festival director on appropriate productions for the festival. Part of my duties is also to manage the Kalamata Dance Centre, organizing dance and education events throughout the year.

During the past 12 years I have been curating as an independent curator visual arts exhibitions in galleries, museums and other cultural organizations. I have also been curating video and performance programmes which have been presented in important museums and cultural organizations throughout Europe. During the same period I have been writing on art in the most important journals, newspapers and magazines in Greece, I have permanent collaborations with cultural organizations for which I write texts on dance and art catalogues and I have been writing as a dance critic.

e-MobilArt was an EU funded project aiming to bring together 35 artists from all over the world and get them involved in collaborative interactive installations which were finally exhibited in the 2nd Thessaloniki Contemporary Art Biennial in Greece and in Katowice Gallery in Poland. The project leader was the University of Athens in collaboration with the University of Rovaniemi and the University of Applied Arts in Vienna. I was employed as one of the 3 curators of the project, deciding on the artists who would participate, following and supporting the artistic creation, writing the texts to communicate this creation to the audiences and curating the final exhibitions.

I was the Vice-President of a 7 member committee designing the cultural policy for dance in Greece and deciding about the funding schemes. We had to innovate the funding system and find ways to support dance artists in their creation process, implement these new processes, follow their evolution and assess the results in order to adjust them. We were responsible for the correct use of the budget for the dance coming from the Greek Ministry of Culture. We were also responsible to overview the Greek dance production and find ways to promote it outside the country.

Under the auspices of Thessaloniki International Film Festival I founded a festival on movement and the moving image, VideoDance. I also worked as a project manager for important activities throughout the year, as a programmer and curator of film events (for example CineMythology, a big film event including more than 50 films inspired by ancient Greek Mythology, recorded performances and a live dance performance). I was the artistic director of VideoDance from 2000 to 2007, throughout its duration. VideoDance included video and film screenings, live performance of experimental live arts, media works, installations, live media performances and other experimental forms of art.