Stratou studied fine arts at the London Institute Central School of Art and Design between 1983 and 1988, and she was an adjunct professor at the Athens School of Fine Arts from 2007 to 2012. Stratou represented Greece at the 48th Venice Biennalein 1999, and the Adelaide Festival in Australia in 2012. She is the co-founder of the non-profit organisation Vital Space. Vital Space is based upon the principle that artworks can change the world for the better and "is dedicated to the initiation of art projects designed to reach and influence a wide and diverse audience."
Notable works
Her work has been on display in the National Museum of Contemporary Art, Athens and are also on display in museums and private collections in Israel, France, the United States and Egypt. In 1995 she collaborated with industrial designer Alexandra Stratou and architect Stella Constantinides, and in 1997 they created Desert Breath, a 100,000 square metre spiral-shaped sand sculpture in the Eastern Egyptian Sahara desert near El Gouna by the Red Sea. For the 2004 Olympics in Athens, her piece The River of Life at the National Museum of Contemporary Art was a part of the Transcultures project. It showed seven videos on seven large screens in a circular room; the films were shot over ten months of seven major rivers from sunrise to sunset with the camera fixed in the same position to capture the uninterrupted flow and shared rhythm. In her 2007 project Cut – 7 dividing lines she covered 60,000 kilometres with her then partner Yanis Varoufakis to photograph seven security walls that divide populations. The works were shown at her gallery Zoumboulakis in Athens.
Personal life
She is married to Yanis Varoufakis, former Greek finance minister and renowned economist. Her mother is Eleni Potaga-Stratou, a Greek modern artist, and her father is Phaidron Stratos from the family Stratos who founded the Peiraiki-Patraikitextile industry in Patras, Peloponnese, Greece’s largest textile industry in the past. It has been speculated that she was the subject of Pulp's hit "Common People".
