Ioanna Sakellaraki (b.1989) is a Greek visual artist and creative practice researcher whose work investigates the relationship between loss, memory and fiction. Rooted in photography yet expanding into collage and archival practices, her practice draws on personal experiences and historical narratives to re-imagine them materially, symbolically and subjectively.

Born in the Athenian suburb of Petroupolis, Ioanna grew up in a household shaped by dual influences: a mother whose resilience and devotion taught her persistence and discipline, and a father whose adventurous life at sea inspired her to remain open‑minded and free in spirit. From this balance of care and exploration, she learned to approach the world with both determination and curiosity from an early age. After passing the national exams in Greece, she studied Journalism at the National and Kapodistrian University of Athens, where she immersed herself in aesthetics, classics and literature. Her first artistic awakenings came during outdoor seminars on myth and psychoanalysis held in ancient ruins and amphitheaters across her hometown.

During the second year of her BA, Ioanna spent a formative Erasmus period at Ludwig Maximilian University in Munich, where she combined studies in film and sociolinguistics and met her lifelong partner, Victor. After graduating, she embarked on fourteen years abroad, settling across different countries while pursuing her interest in culture through an MA. Her fascination with images and the ways they carry history into living heritage, led her to work with NGOs in the cultural field, while at the same time nurturing a self-taught photographer’s practice from 2012 onwards. In Brussels, she deepened this passion by attending a French evening photography school named after film maker Agnès Varda, balancing her office work with nightly classes and weekend journeys dedicated to photographing ruins and exploring the relationship between space and memory.

At the age of 27, two years after her father’s passing, Ioanna left her NGO career to fully commit to becoming a photographic artist. Entering the art scene, she drew on her creative drive but also the skills of her previous professional life to navigate this new terrain. Through portfolio reviews and festival exhibitions, she established her initial network, and soon after, she was offered a place in the MA Photography program at the Royal College of Art in London. Her time at the RCA proved formative: it was here that she learned to bring her storytelling sensibility into dialogue with contemporary image‑making, sharpening her critical thinking around photography as both medium and discourse. Mentored by painter Jonathan Miles and writer Alice Butler, this period marked the beginning of her research-led practice, culminating in an international scholarship to undertake her practice-led PhD study Archiving the Disaster: Preservation, Separation and Encounter at RMIT University in Melbourne.

Her achievements include The Royal Photographic Society Bursary Award (2018), a Sony World Photography Award (2020), the Reminders Photography Stronghold Grant in Tokyo (2019), and the International Photography Grant Creative Prize (2019). She has also received funding from Arts Council England (2021) and has been nominated for the Inge Morath Award by Magnum Foundation (USA), the Prix HSBC, Prix Levallois and Prix Voies Off (France).

Ioanna’s work has been exhibited internationally, with solo shows in Tokyo, Melbourne, Belfast, Braga, Greece and Berlin. Her projects have been featured in The New Yorker, TIME, Aesthetica, Wallpaper and journals including The Wall Street Journal, The Guardian, Financial Times and Deutsche Welle. Her monograph The Truth is in the Soil is published by GOST Books in London (2022), and her work has been acquired by the Los Angeles County Museum of Art (LACMA).

She is a prospective Fulbright fellow at the Smithsonian’s National Museum of American History (2026), continuing her exploration on how archives, both personal and institutional, become sites where memory is preserved, contested and reactivated. Drawing from her interest in fragmentary making, Ioanna’s archivally-driven artworks challenge the idea of a single, fixed reality. Instead, they evolve through a shifting process of meaning, using photography and text to suggest new ways of re‑imagining history.