Phoebe Giannisi was born in Athens in 1964. She studied architecture at the National Polytechnic School of Athens (1988) and received her PhD at the Centre Louis Gernet in Paris (1994), where she completed a dissertation on Ancient Greek poetry and architecture, focusing on the metaphor of the poem as a path (published later as Récits des voies. Chant et cheminement en Grèce archaïque. Grenoble: Editions Jérome Millon, 2006). A 2016 Humanities Fellow of Columbia University, Giannisi is a professor of architecture at the University of Thessaly.
Following a series of publications, poetic performances and exhibitions—including co-curating the Greek Pavilion for the 2010 Venice Biennale and poetic multimedia installations at the National Museum of Contemporary Art in Athens in 2012—Giannisi constructed her own idiosyncratic way of approaching poetry that she calls “chimeric poetics.” Her personal work, in the general field of ecopoetics, focuses on the polyphony of voices attached to place and the ethnography of the animated subjects that inhabit it. Bodies, weather, earth, seeds, orality, writing, love, female condition, mythic personas, sound, multiplicity, language, and animal beings constitute the primary subjects for Giannisi’s poetic activity. For more information about the trajectory of Giannisi’s work, visit her website: http://phoebegiannisi.net/en/.