Biography
Giorgos Ziakas was born in the village of Sykourio, Province of Larissa. He stud- ied painting and stage design at the School of Fine Arts in Athens, under Yiannis Moralis and Vassilis Vassiliadis. He made his name as as stage designer.He collaborated with all state theatres and the Cyprus Theatre Organisa- tion. He worked for various productions of Free Theatre and most Regional Mu- nicipal Theatres. He was a founding member of the Thessalian Theatre and its creative director. Some of his most prominent works include Euripides’s Electra and Iphigenia in Tauris for the Thessalian Theatre, Euripides’s The Suppliant Women and The Trojan Women as well as Aristophanes’s Plutus for the Cyprus Theatre Or- ganisation (where he proposed a new approach regarding costumes for ancient tragedy), Sophocles’s Oedipus Rex for the Greek National Theatre, which was per- formed at the Colosseum in Rome, Sophocles’s Electra and Medea with Jenny Karezi, Sophocles’s The Women of Trachis and Hecuba, Euripides’s Cyclop for the National Theatre of Northern Greece and also Brecht’s The Caucasian Chalk Cir- cle, Iacovos Kambanellis’s The Court of Wonders, Dimitris Kehaidis’s The Fair and Goldoni’s The Coffee-House and The True Friend for the Thessalian Theatre.
His work at the cinema was mainly for Theo Angelopoulos’s films. He de- signed for The Hunters, Alexander the Great, Voyage to Kythera, Ulysses Gaze, An Eternity and a Day and Another Sea, which was left unfinished following An- gelopoulos’s untimely death. He has also worked with Dimitris Mavrikios for The Street of Lamore and Yiannis Smaragdis for Cell Zero and Voyage of Return, Giorgos Stamboulopoulos for Two Suns in the Sky and Tonis Lykouressis for Chrysomallousa.
He was a founding member of the Centre for Visual Arts, participating in all group exhibitions. He also took part in two exhibitions with Group 4+ and two country-wide exhibitions at Zappeion in Athens. His work has been shown in eleven one-man exhibitions in Athens, Thessaloniki, Larissa and Patras.
After working as an assistant at the School of Architecture of NTUA, he re- signed in order to pursue that fascinating adventure of the making of Alexander the Great. In 1985 he was elected as a Professor of the School of Fine Arts in Athens, where he taught for twenty one years. Since 2006 he is a Professor Emeritus.
He has received many awards during his longstanding career, while in 2006 the Centre for Study and Research for Greek Theatre honoured him with the Panos Aravantinos award for his valuable and significant contribution to Greek theatre.
Exhibitions
Giorgos Ziakas, Ζωγραφική για τον κινηματογράφο (07/03/2019)Works
