Born and raised under a junta on the isles of Lesbos and Crete, Greece, Eurydice ran off to America at the age of fifteen. Her grandparents had migrated back to Greece from the vibrant Greek communities of Alexandria and Smyrna. She learned early in life that history—from war to invention, from philosophy to theology—happens on the bodies of women, often literally (in the form of mass rape and abductions of women as spoils) and always metaphorically (in the form of marital rape and parental girl-breeder trafficking). Both elevated and vilified like Helen of Troy or Maria Magdalena, women signify passion, redemption, war spoils and conquest, and have been used to justify patriarchal territorial aggression throughout history. The ubiquitous bodies of women, as mothers, as beloveds, as artists’ models and poets’ muses, as objects of beauty or terror, reverence or disgust, have been the single consistent metaphor of Eurydice’s artistic evolution. The idea of woman encompasses the continuous ambivalence toward life (and sexuality and mortality) that initiates and then sustains the male aesthetic domination of art and literature. Eurydice has explored this theme and only this theme in fiction, poetry, nonfiction, and in filmmaking, painting, drawing, printmaking, collages, installations, and, most recently, out of respect for the traditional unrewarded arts of women throughout history, in hand stitching. By temperament and ideology, Eurydice practices the synergy of artistic media and incorporates the lessons from each medium in her overall oeuvre. She is interested in opening up new venues of expression and subverting familiar modalities of paradigms that have been co-opted by patriarchy and late capitalism in order to present an alternate reality which she hopes will be more faithful to women’s interior lives and psyches. Her art centers on lifting the veils, layer after layer. Apocalypse means unveiling in Greek.
On the year of her last book publication, ten years after she began writing professionally, while living in NYC & wintering in Miami Beach, Eurydice found out that she was pregnant. She was writing a monthly sex column for Gear magazine and preparing to go on a book tour. She chose to raise her child in sunny Miami Beach, resisted offers to write a book on A Year in the Life of a Pregnant Sex Writer, and instead applied for and was awarded by a jury of artists prime studio space at the Art Center of S. Florida on Lincoln Rd in Miami Beach. For the next ten years she worked exclusively as an artist and her career change coincided with the arrival of Art Basel and the artistic renaissance it brought to Miami. Her artwork was bought by major collectors and museums and she was regularly commissioned by private businesses. She gradually turned her attention to embroidery, an ancient feminine craft that brought together her Eastern and Western heritages and which she turned into feminist avant-garde art. Following her 10-year retrospective, with her daughter now older, she resumed writing, just as Syrian refugees inundated her native island. This experience gave her the framework she needed to ground her story of the refugee experience to the 21st c. internet-centered present time and in the process reinvent the ancient Greek tropes that inform her take on the world.
Refugees Of Syria
As a native of Lesbos, Eurydice was personally affected by the flow of half a million refugees who arrived on her island in the span of six months, fleeing war in Syria. Her island has long been the site of people in exile and transit. But no event in recent memory has left quite a mark on the island where Eurydice spends her summers on the cove where she was born. She stands here in front of a mound of life vests, each worn by a refugee in transit.
Aiding Refugee Camps
Every time Eurydice visits home, she spends part of each day visiting the refugee camps on her island, volunteering in refugee aid as a representative of the people of Lesbos. She also acts as a liaison to foreign aid organizations and select individuals. She also assists in the sea rescue of those who still wash ashore at dawn.
Charity Organization
A humanitarian at heart, Eurydice was moved to found her own charity to help the people who are risking their lives to cross the 6-mile straits that connect the coast of Turkey to her ancestral shores. Her NGO, Lost Genius Academy, facilitates refugee aid. She teams up with University and governmental agencies or NGOs and aid agencies based in Europe and the US to carry humanitarian works.
Exchanges
We help visitation rights required for foreign volunteers who wish to help the refugees of Lesbos. The NGO also organizes the exchange of educational visits to the refugee camps by student organizations from abroad and to develop the cultural exchange between the people. The collaboration is also an exchange of artistic, literary, musical, educational, & social presentations and installations on Lesbos.
Lifejacket cemetery, Mithimna Molyvos Lesvos Greece.
Lesvos, Greece.
Eurydice with her great Aunt, Emilia Kamvisi, who at 86 was nominated for the Nobel Peace prize in 2016 for her contribution to the refugee aid in Skala Kimamineas, her seaside village of 50 inhabitants that received the majority of the refugees on Lesvos.