Manoussaki Despina Kleoni

Kleoni Manoussakis is a New York based Greek multimedia artist. At an early age she expressed an interest in arts and foreign culture. She completed her B.A. at Columbia College Chicago, with her main focus in installation art and photography. During her time in Columbia she had the chance to complete two full size installations while undertaking independent projects guided by Phil Bergman. She received a scholarship to study classical sculpture in Italy, through the program Leonardo da Vinci, and spent three months in Florence working with stone and becoming familiar with Italian Renaissance art. At the end of the year Kleoni’ had her first solo show in a commercial gallery in Athens. Thereafter she was accepted into the Interactive Telecommunication Program, of NYU, where she explored new media technologies and focused on interactivity, performance art and video. Through her work she challenges the notion of interactivity, focusing on the effect of technology in every day public life. Paying particular attention to the video representation of everyday life, while subverting socially normalized expectations of behavior, my art seeks to explore the beauty of the ordinary. Since her graduation from ITP, Kleoni has worked with various theater projects in both creative and technical positions. She got invited to Seoul to work with WIP Theater Company and she is currently working with Richard Foreman and The Ontological Hysteric Theater. Her work has been exhibited in festivals in the US, Europe, Asia and venues such as the Brooklyn Museum of Art and Novosibirsk State Art Museum in Siberia