Vera Iona Papadopoulou is a director and mentor working with performance as a unified, composed medium. Her practice is grounded in autofiction and autotheory, as she writes biographical and research-based scripts drawing from lived experience, embodied memory and erased or silenced narratives. Her work engages with themes such as childhood sexual abuse, psychological projection, mental health, love, desire, death and loss, often examined through the lens of intercultural identity as a contextual frame. She explores how experience becomes memory, how memory is regulated or erased, and how performance can operate as a space of initiation, care and re-inscription. These texts function as invitations rather than closed narratives, initiating collective processes through dialogue and shared presence. Collaborators—performance artists, actors, video artists and sound artists—develop autonomous works in response to her scripts through group exchange and collaboration. Vera supports this process through mentoring, rehearsals and dramaturgical guidance, while directing and composing these individual works into a single performance experience. She brings together actions, texts, performative roles and soundscapes into a cohesive dramaturgical structure, where collectivity emerges as an intensity of lived experiences rather than consensus. Her methodology emphasizes safe spaces for others, care-based collaboration and the active pursuit of pleasure and lightness as political gestures against discipline, trauma and economic precarity. Alongside live performance, she frequently integrates her own experimental films and video works as performative scenography, treating moving image as spatial, affective and temporal architecture.

She studied Film Directing at VGIK (Moscow), Architecture and Design at the Odesa State Academy of Civil Engineering and Architecture, and Digital Arts at the Athens School of Fine Arts, and completed the independent program “The Problems of Contemporary Art: New Artistic Strategies” at the Institute of Contemporary Art (ICA), Moscow. Accordingly, her architectural background informs her spatial thinking, while her cinematic training shapes her approach to dramaturgy and time-based composition. Her professional experience includes directing site-specific and durational performances, creating script-based collective works such as On the Neck, curating performance festivals including Talk to Me and (–) FE MALE Home, and mentoring performance artists in museums, galleries and international residencies. She has collaborated with Marina Abramovic (2011) and Yoko Ono (2015), and has worked extensively as a performance artist and as a director of documentary and performative films. 

Alongside her artistic practice, Vera works as a Creative Producer and Director in large-scale educational and social-impact productions. As the founder and creative lead of Full Flight Studio, she has directed and overseen projects developed in collaboration with organizations such as UNICEF, the Greek Ministry of Education, the Ministry of Health, universities and European programs—leading the creation of educational films, animated narratives, documentaries and immersive media experiences.

She is also the founder of spiti8 | The Home of Performance & Experiential Arts, a platform dedicated to performance, collective creation and experiential learning. Through spiti8, she develops performances, labs and research-based artistic processes that bring together artists, educators and communities in shared acts of creation.

Vera’s work is grounded in the belief that art is not separate from life, but a practice of presence—one that allows individuals and collectives to reimagine how they live, relate and create in times of change.