Authors' biographical notes

Mark Mazower Ira D. Wallach Professor of History at Columbia University, New York, specializes in modern Greece, twentieth-century Europe, and international history. His prize-winning books include Hitler’s Empire: Nazi Rule in Occupied Europe (Penguin, 2008) and Salonica, City of Ghosts: Christians, Muslims and Jews, 1430–1950 (Vintage, 2004). He comments on international affairs and reviews books for the Financial Times, Nation, London Review of Books, New York Review of Books, amongst others. In 2016, he made the film Techniques of the Body, a meditation on the refugee crisis in the long run of Greek history with director Constantine Giannaris, and he is currently exploring the theme of the unburied dead with theater director Theodoros Terzopoulos. His most recent book is a family history, What You Did Not Tell: A Russian Past and the Journey Home (Other Press, 2017). Mazower is founding director of Columbia Institute for Ideas and Imagination, which opened in 2018 at Reid Hall in Paris with an inaugural fellowship class including faculty and artists.

Panayotis Panopoulos teaches anthropology at the Department of Social Anthropology and History, University of the Aegean, Mytilene. His research interests concern the anthropology of music, sound, and performance. His ethnographic writing, published in international journals including Journal of the Royal Anthropological Institute and Ethnologie Française, concern the symbolism of sound and hearing in modern Greece, the study of local cultural associations, and the role of musical performance in the symbolic construction of place. He is currently conducting research on the culture of the deaf community in Greece as well as collaborating with visual artists on projects. He has taught at Democritus University of Thrace, University of Crete, and Panteion University, Athens. He was a Visiting Research Scholar at Princeton University (2012, 2002–03) and University of California, Berkeley (2009). Panopoulos has also taught as an invited lecturer at Martin Luther University of Halle-Wittenberg and University of Cologne.

Gražina Subelytė is Assistant Curator at the Peggy Guggenheim Collection in Venice, where she recently curated the exhibitions From Gesture to Form: Postwar European and American Art from the Schulhof Collection (2019), 1948: The Biennale of Peggy Guggenheim (2018), and Rita Kernn-Larsen: Surrealist Paintings (2017). She is currently working on the exhibition Peggy Guggenheim: The Last Dogaressa (2019) centered on Guggenheim’s collecting after 1948. In addition, she is co-curating a major exhibition Surrealism and Magic: From Max Ernst to Leonora Carrington that will open at the Peggy Guggenheim Collection in the spring of 2021 and at Museum Barberini in Potsdam later that year. Subelytė is a PhD Candidate at the Courtauld Institute of Art in London, researching the work of the Swiss-American Surrealist artist and scholar Kurt Seligmann, and has recently written the preface to a new collector’s edition of Seligmann’s book The Mirror of Magic: A History of Magic in the Western World (Inner Traditions, 2018).

Adam Szymczyk was Artistic Director of documenta 14 in Athens and Kassel in 2017. In 1997, he cofounded the Foksal Gallery Foundation in Warsaw. He was Director at Kunsthalle Basel from 2004 to 2014. In 2008, he co-curated with Elena Filipovic the 5th Berlin Biennale for Contemporary Art, When Things Cast No Shadow. He is a Member of the Board of the Museum of Modern Art in Warsaw, and Member of the Advisory Committee of Kontakt (the Art Collection of Erste Group and ERSTE Foundation) in Vienna. In 2011, Szymczyk received the Walter Hopps Award for Curatorial Achievement at the Menil Foundation in Houston.

Syrago Tsiara completed her studies in History and Archaeology at Aristotle University of Thessaloniki and continued with an MA in Social History of Art at University of Leeds. Her PhD dissertation was on art in public space and the formation of national identity and memory. Since 2000, she has been working as a curator at the State Museum of Contemporary Art (current name, MOMus–Museum of Modern Art–Costakis collection), and since 2007, she is the director of the Thessaloniki Centre of Contemporary Art (current name, MOMus–Experimental Center for the Arts). She has taught at the University of Thessaly from 2004 to 2008, and in 2009, she co-curated the 2nd Thessaloniki Biennale of Contemporary Art with Gabriela Salgado and Bisi Silva. She is also the director of the 6th and 7th Thessaloniki Biennale of Contemporary Art (2017, 2019). Tsiara is the Deputy Director of MOMus–Museum of Contemporary Art and MOMus–Experimental Center for the Arts, and the National Commissioner of the Pavilion of Greece at the 58th International Art Exhibition—La Biennale di Venezia.

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