Dr. Elena Parpa writes, teaches, and curates alongside the field of history of art. She holds a PhD from the Department of Art History Birkbeck College, University of London. Her research considers the way notions of landscape interact with the themes of identity, memory, gender, and climate change in contemporary art.
She has curated a number of exhibitions, including How to Make a Garden (Visual Artists and Art Theorists Association – phytorio, 2012), Exercises in Orientation (Nicosia Municipal Arts Centre, 2013/15), Planetes (Palia Ilektriki, Shelly House, European Capital of Culture, 2017), Manifestations: Visions of the Otherworldly in Painting and Drawing (Nicosia Municipal Arts Centre, 2024) and Agropoetics: Soils/Bodies (State Gallery of Contemporary Art -SPEL, part of the Cultural Programme of the Cyprus Presidency of the Council of the European Union 2026). Her essays appear in journals, exhibition catalogues, including the ‘Daybook’ of documenta 14 (2017), and in the edited collections Marianna Christofides: Days in Between (Hatje Cantz, 2021), Contemporary Art in Cyprus: Politics, Identity and Culture Across Borders (Bloomsbury, 2021), and Colonial Cyprus: A Cultural History, 1878-1960 (Bloomsbury, 2024). She wrote the second book in the series of Next Spring (Atlas Projectos, 2018), edited by Laura Preston.
She is an Associate Lecturer at the Fine Art Programme, University of Nicosia and the co-founder of Celadon Center for Arts & Ecologies, a non-governmental organization operating at the intersection of art and ecology.