Alia Tsagkari (b. 1996) is an art historian and curator specialising in modern art and contemporary curatorial practice, grounded in rigorous academic research. She holds an MA from the Courtauld Institute of Art, London, where her research, supervised by Gavin Parkinson, examined postmodern interpretations of modernism. She previously studied Art History and Archaeology at the University of Ioannina.

In 2020, she introduced the concept of Urban Exoticism, a critical framework for reconsidering contemporary aesthetic through the experinece of urban space. The concept has informed  lectures, workshops and exhibitions in Athens, Berlin and London including collaborations with the Ostkreuzschule für Fotografie (2021, 2023), as well as presentations such as Der Greif’s Guest Room in Berlin (2024).

She served as co–project manager for the establishment of the Gaïtis–Simossi Museum on Ios, contributing to its institutional formation, organisational structure and long-term exhibition strategy.

Her curatorial practice spans both historical legacies and emerging artists, with exhibitions presented in Athens, Paris and New York. She has worked closely with the estates of Vlassis Caniaris, Yannis Gaïtis, Gavriella Simossi, Vasso Katraki and Haris Gavrilos, advancing the scholarly recontextualisation and renewed public understanding of their work. In her work with contemporary artists, she mobilises decolonial methodologies and institutional critique to interrogate the structures through which art is historicised, displayed and legitimised. Drawing on posthumanist thought, she foregrounds material agency, interdependence and the destabilisation of anthropocentric narratives. Attentive to practices of transgression, she approaches the exhibition as a site of structural disruption.

Her academic research anatomises the reappraisal of ancient myth and ritual in Dada and Surrealism, as well as the intersections of ethnography, ritual practice and the historical avant-garde, critically interrogating dominant art-historical narratives and institutional frameworks. 

Her scholarly and curatorial work includes publications and exhibition catalogues, as well as presentations at Greek and international academic conferences.

She is a member of the Association of Greek Art Historians and the Association for Art History(London).