Ioanna Sakellaraki is a Greek visual artist and creative practice researcher. Her work investigates the relationship between collective cultural memory and fiction. Drawing emphasis on the photographic object, process and encounter, she explores the boundaries of a primitive, yet futuristic vision of places and people. She is a graduate of Journalism with an MA in Photography from The Royal College of Art and an MA in Cultural Studies. Following her interest in inter-disciplinary critical theory in relation to visual arts, she was awarded an International Scholarship for undertaking her PhD (Doctor of Philosophy) 'Archiving the Disaster: Preservation, Separation and Encounter' at RMIT University in Melbourne (2021-2025). She is the recipient of The Royal Photographic Society Bursary Award 2018 and was the winner of a Sony World Photography Award in 2020. In 2019, she was awarded with the Reminders Photography Stronghold Grant in Tokyo and the International Photography Grant Creative Prize and in 2021 she received further funding from Arts Council England. Nominations include: the Inge Morath Award by Magnum Foundation in USA, the Prix HSBC, the Prix Levallois and the Prix Voies Off in France. Her work has been exhibited internationally with recent solo shows in Tokyo, Melbourne, Belfast, Braga, Greece and Berlin. Her projects have been featured in magazines such as The New Yorker, TIME, Aesthetica and Wallpaper and journals including The Guardian, Financial Times and Deutsche Welle. Her work has been acquired by the Los Angeles County Museum of Art (LACMA) Collection. Her monograph ‘The Truth is in the Soil’ is published by GOST Books (London, 2022).
As part of her Fulbright project Between the Fragment and Nature: The Ruin as a Living Archive, to be undertaken at the Smithsonian National Museum of American History’s Archives Center, Ioanna will be working with glass stereograph collections to reflect on the theoretical, critical and material disposition of the fragment in Greek antiquity for the realization of a series of artworks in the intersection of photography, collage and installation art.