# Elettra Stamboulis

Elettra Stamboulis (born December 31, 1969) in Bologna, Italy, is an art curator, high school principal, writer, and comic writer.
She was the art director of Komikazen Festival in Ravenna. She has written many Graphic Novels including Piccola Gerusalemme, Cena con Gramsci and Arrivederci Berlinguer. She is currently the principal of Liceo Artistico e Musicale Antonio Canova in Forlì.
She has curated personal exhibitions of Joe Sacco, Marjane Satrapi, Aleksandar Zograf, among others and she curated the first personal exhibition in a public museum of Zehra Doğan in Brescia in 2019. And Badiucao's first solo exhibition in 2021 in Brescia as well. She is the founder of InguineMAH!gazine, and G.I.U.D.A. Geographical Institute of Unconventional Drawings Arts. She has written for various magazines including Linus, Fumettologica, Efimerida ton Syntakton and Artribune.

## Early life and education

Born to Greek political exiled, she grew up in Ravenna. She studied at Università di Roma La Sapienza and she has a degree in Classical Philology. She attended a two years course for Conservator and Curator, and she worked as translator from Italian and Modern Greek. She started her interest in political and reality based comics in 2001, staging Joe Sacco's exhibition in Ravenna Clouds from beyond the borders.

## Professional career

The year after she curated, in association with Stripburger, the collective exhibition Perventiquattromilabaci, which presented the alternative comics scene in the Former Yugoslavia and in the Balkans. In 2003 she curated one of the few exhibition with the original artworks of Persepolis by Marjane Satrapi, who travelled across Italy. She was in the meanwhile also the art curator of the Young Artists selection in her area. In 2006 she presented the collective exhibition and catalogue dedicated to the Turkish comics magazine Le Man, which was travelling as well in Italy and abroad. In 2007 she curated the collective exhibition dedicated to Lebanese comics scene Cedars in comics: in that exhibition where for the first time presented in a curatorial form to a European audience authors such as Mazen Kerbaj, Lena Meraj, Barrack Rima and Zeina Abirached. In 2011 she curated Egypt without pyramides, about the work of Magdy El Shafee and Pino Creanza.
In 2012 she prepared the Mediterranean Biennale in Ancona organizing and curating Arrivals and Departures - Mediterranean inviting artists such as Adelita Husni Bey, Almudena Lobera, Dor Guez, Mary Zigoury, Zoulikha Bouaddellah. She dedicated to comics writing in the sequent years, publishing with Becco Giallo a trilogy about left leaders in the XX century in Italy, focusing on Antonio Gramsci, Sandro Pertini and Enrico Berlinguer.
She opens in collaboration with Gianluca Costantini, who is also her husband, the gallery Mirada who was active from 2004 until 2015 in Ravenna.
From 2008 to 2011 she was the City Councillor for Education in the city of Ravenna.
In 2014 she curated the last edition of Komikazen Festival in Ravenna, 99% dedicated to art workers and their rights: 99 drawers were called to participate in an open action in the local museum, they were asked to frame their works and install them. The idea was to show how art workers are not considered workers like others and they are asked to do theirselves even installation without a fee. During the opening 99 pizza were served by riders, always in terms of collective action.
In 2017 and 2019 she curated the young artists Biennale in Ravenna RAM the first one dedicated to 1977 and the second to Gender, Code and Languages in MAR.
She was then invited to contribute to collective catalogue like the one dedicated to Corto Maltese in 2019 by Comicon Festival in Naples and she started to collaborate with the Sicilian publisher Mesogea, with whom she started the project Cartographic.
In 2019 she curated the solo exhibition of Zehra Doğan in Brescia Avremo anche giorni migliori, which has a huge audience in Italy and then she curated her live performance in Ravenna Festival, during the concert of Friendship of maestro Riccardo Muti in 2020 in Ravenna and Paestum. In November 2020 she also curated the project The time of Butterflies: dedicated to the sisters Mirabal in PAC of Milan with works of Zehra Doğan.