The Artist on the Composer –a pioneering programme run by the Greek National Opera in collaboration with NEON – connects contemporary artists with classical music and opera to forge a singular synergy of different art forms within a single unified whole.

For its third iteration, The Artist on the Composer programme is commissioning the artist Ioanna Pantazopoulou to create an immersive installation in which visual art and music invite audiences to discover a magical, fairy tale world.

Ioanna Pantazopoulou (b. 1984 Athens, Greece) lives and works in New York, USA. She creates ephemeral sculptural monuments out of unusual materials, that tell a story. The sculptures follow the principles of architecture without being trapped in them. They overturn the notion of experience and participation, they attempt – through unexpected collisions – to create new connections between the past and the present, of what is lost and found.

Pantazopoulou received both her BA (2007) and MA (2009) in Fine Art from Chelsea College of Art and Design (London, UK). Her work has been exhibited at numerous venues, including: deCordova Sculpture Park and Museum (MA, USA); B.A.M. (the Brooklyn Academy of Music – NY, USA); SCAD Gutstein Gallery (GA, USA); Culture Lab (FL, USA); SAFE Gallery (NY, USA); JAG Projects (NY, USA); Situations Gallery (NY, USA); NADA Miami (FL, USA); Grand Union Gallery (Birmingham, UK); Primetime Gallery (NY, USA); MOMus-Museum Alex Mylona – Macedonian Museum of Contemporary Art (Athens, GR); Hydra School Projects (Hydra, GR); and NEON (Athens, GR). Her works appear in a number of permanent collections: the Fidelity Investments Corporate Art Collection, the D.Daskalopoulos Collection, the Solomon R. Guggenheim Collection, and the MCA Chicago Collection. Pantazopoulou is represented in Greece by the Ileana Tounta Contemporary Art Centre.

The Artist on the Composer programme launched in 2019 with the newly commissioned work Noli me Tangere by Nikos Navridis and continued with its second commission to Yorgos Lanthimos and his short film Bleat, screened to the accompaniment of live orchestral music, presented in 2022.