Athens Design Forum brings together specialists, innovators, and strategic partners who investigate and amplify the history and prospective future of design
Katerina Papanikolopoulos
Founder, Creative Director - Athens Design Forum
Katerina Papanikolopoulos is the founder and creative director of Athens Design Forum, a non-profit initiative introducing an experimental format for experiencing design in Athens. With the aim to solidify the Mediterranean as a historical and contemporary center of creative production, ADF advocates for an interdisciplinary approach and evidently encourages design as a social tool that is interwoven with heritage and migration patterns.
Graduating Summa Cum Laude from UCLA [University of California, Los Angeles] with a degree in Art History, she fortifies her vision with a research-based practice involving archival studies within photography, craft, textiles, and film to understand context and evolution. Following engagements with international galleries and fairs such as Blum & Poe, Frieze, and Adorno International Design Collaboration, encountering design was a natural transition as she comes from a family of architects, builders, and makers of vernacular craft.
Kristian Snorre Anderson
Global Advisory Board
CEO & Co-Founder, Adorno International Design Collaboration
Adorno International Design Collaboration is a digital gallery for the best of collectible design and craft from around the globe. Selected by a network of on-the-ground curators in major design cities, Adorno’s collections provide a unique insight into the world’s diverse creative communities – and celebrate the work of the designers shaping them.
Julia Montanez
Global Advisory Board
Founder - The Design Release
Julia Montanez is a consultant, curator, designer, and co-founder of the tech-based platform, The Design Release -- the ultimate source for discovering global design events, news, and industry jobs. For seven years, she was the Editor-at-Large for the Architectural Digest Design Show, focusing on the popular Made section, dedicated to emerging designers.
Jimmy MacDonald
Global Advisory Board
Founder - London Design Fair
An exhibitions man who knows how to drum up both physical and digital audiences with long-standing connections within the design industry, cultural institutions, and international embassies.
Zachos Varfis
Local Advisory Board
Founder - LATRAAC
Founded in 2017, Latraac quickly became one of Athens’ best-loved venues, featuring skateboarding, music, and arts. It has built a dedicated community while hosting events including skateboarding classes for young refugees and collaborating with international artists/musicians. Latraac was shortlisted for the Architecture category in the 2019 Beazley Designs of The Year at the London Design Museum.
Thanos Karampatsos and Christina Kotsilelou
Local Advisory Board
Founders, Greece is for Lovers
Greece is for Lovers is the brainchild of Thanos Karampatsos and Christina Kotsilelou, as lovingly conceived at the foot of the Acropolis hill in late 2005. Sharing similar aesthetic influences, the creative minds behind it introduced a brand new sense of ‘Greekness’ to contemporary product design, by mixing up a concoction of their country’s spiciest ingredients: humor, irony, nonchalance, and extravagance. Inspired by the stereotypical notion of what is widely held to be Greek, their designs comment on habitual activities and behavioral patterns of both the past and the present; they narrate an alternative home country, consisting of part memory, part fantasy, and part wish.
GIFL products have been represented in selected retailers such as Selfridges, Paul Smith, Moss, as well as the Deutsche Guggenheim, Printemps Design, Georges Pompidou, and the Grimaldi Forum among others. Private commissions and special events have been produced for companies including Korres, Kiehl’s, Design Hotels, New Hotel Athens, as well as art institutions and museums like The Benaki Museum, Vandalorum, and La Triennale di Milano. Special publishing work has been commissioned by media such as The Future Laboratory, Sight Unseen, Nomas Magazine, and Mold Magazine among others.
Elena Demetria Chantzis
Local Advisory Board
Elena Demetria Chantzis is a Greek-Italian visual artist, designer and architect based in Athens. She studied Architecture at Sapienza University in Rome and holds postgraduate degrees in Interior Design from the Politecnico di Milano and in Art and Architectural Design from the Instead Parapoesis programme of the University of Thessaly, where she has also worked as a tutor. Her work emanates from the observation and reinterpretation of objects and patterns of everyday life, reflecting on current global social and environmental issues, using autobiographical narratives and mixed-media such as photography, text, drawings, video and sound.
She has participated in group shows in Athens at State of Concept gallery, the Agricultural University, Circuits and Currents, at Marpissa festival in Paros, Aether gallery in Sofia, the 15th Venice Architecture Biennale and others. She has collaborated with the architectural and design initiatives Sarcha, Kassandras, Diplomates, Atelier 66 and Antonas Office for the production of installations and exhibitions such as London Festival of Architecture, Documenta14 and the Venice Biennale. She has worked for art spaces such as Leefewerk and Dino Morra gallery and assisted Mary Zygouri for the Aeschylean Festival and Rainer Oldendorf for Documenta 14.