Argyro is a Designer of cultural experiences, an Educator and a Businesswoman. Her endeavors are primarily concerned with reinventing free time for the art-conscious in a creative, joyous and meaningful way.
She is Founder and Managing Director of Handpicked, a consultant and production company that curates memorable moments for luxury hotel brands by utilizing experts from the worlds of Music, Art, Design, Gastronomy and Tech and co-Founder of FEAST Greece, a platform that supports cultural entrepreneurship with sustainable tactics. She also explores her interests through various mediums, including, text, public discussions, films and podcasts.
Argyro is a strong advocate for active citizenship, serving as advisor, facilitator and mentor to local communities with solid purpose to amplify their collective impact and to raise up new voices that wish to bring change in their cities. Recent highlights include being a member of the Resilient Thessaloniki team, an international program pioneered by the Rockefeller Foundation, which helped 100 cities around the world to become more resilient to physical, social and economic shocks and stresses. Nowadays she serves as a coordinator for the Thessaloniki Alliance for Culture, a cross-sectoral network of organizations, which aims to bring down the barriers of horizontal collaboration and to promote the sustainable development of Thessaloniki through culture.
Her body of work is centered on multiple cross-sectoral directions:
Designing Experiences
Curating Content
Building Capacities
Supporting Cultural Entrepreneurship
Facilitating Collaboration
Managing Projects
Designing Experiences
During her studies in Business Administration of Tourism Industries she came across with the concept of promoting places through cultural activities during her life-changing experience at the Erasmus placement in Spain. From that point on she centered her academic and professional efforts on Cultural Tourism in developing concepts, events and experiences that integrate the local identity of a destination into lasting holiday memories for the modern traveler. At Handpicked, she is known for her tireless spirit and attitude to be a trailblazer in new ideas with high aesthetics and in new processes with a bias towards innovation and experimentation. Her long lasting partnership with Daios Cove, Luxury Resort & Villas in Crete brought to life unique concepts like Around the Cove like a Local and Magic Mondays or customized family friendly activities like Carnival Games and Daios Treasure Hunt Game.
Curating Content
Up till recently, she curated, developed and produced for four years Reworks Agora, the international forum of ideas of Reworks Festival. A cross-thematic conference funded by the Creative Europe program that explores the future advancements from the intersection of culture, technology and entrepreneurship in collaboration with other 8 major European music festivals. Another significant project, which she co-curated, during the Covid-19 lockdown, was the Unlearning Talks, a 10episode webcast series with virtual conversations on how to develop resilience and sustain sociocultural work in the wider region of South Eastern Europe. Also, she has been commissioned numerous times both in Greece and abroad to organize and moderate public discussions, to give presentations and talks, to write articles and educational guides or to produce videos and podcasts.
Building Capacities
As an educator, she developed the program of the Thessaloniki Cultural Management Academy, a post-graduate program by Goethe-Institut for cultural managers aiming to inspire innovative processes in the cultural sector and fostering exchange in South-Eastern Europe. Additionally, she conceptualized and run two programs presented at the American Tech Labs in four City Libraries around Greece, the Active Communities Tools and CrowdfundABLE. At the same time, she has been invited to curate and organize workshops on funding and project development like the tailor-made capacity building workshop, Hacking Crowdfunding for the Labattoir project in Thessaloniki or SkillUp in Mytilene, Syn-ergos in Athens, EmpathEast in Bulgaria to name a few.
Supporting Cultural Entrepreneurship
In 2014 in the midst of the Greek economic crisis, she launched an initiative to crowdfund local creative projects, FEAST Greece. Its success was overwhelming and stormed the creative communities around Greece overnight. The project was selected to be part of the Greek delegation at the 2016 SXSW festival in Austin and the Externship Program at Hatch Innovation in Portland with the support of the US Embassy in Greece. Nowadays, FEAST runs as a non-profit platform that incubates entrepreneurial ideas through one-to-one capacity building programs and mentorships.
Facilitating Collaboration
Her endless quest for new participatory and collaborative working methods led her to be part of the International Bosch Alumni Center, Culture for Change Network in Greece and CitizensLab, a European network of 55 organizations that prototyped and tested innovative solutions for social challenges. Apart from her recent initiative with the Thessaloniki Alliance for Culture, she co-designed new participatory processes like To Parko opos to thes, which was focused on how to create a process for granting permission from the local authorities to use public space for community activities and Synepikinono, a process that brought suggestions on how to develop a new meaning to the concept of “Under the Auspices” and foster real collaboration between civil actors with local authorities and public organizations.
Managing Projects
For more than two decades Argyro has an extensive experience in the production of cultural projects with national reach for major Greek festivals and international organizations. Her most notable work that launched her career was the 12year experience in Sani Resort, during which she managed an array of projects like Sani Festival, Sani Gourmet, Sani Magazine, Sani Eco Days and others activities of the resort’s entertainment program.
She is passionate about upgrading the creative class, transforming the Greek cultural ecosystem with sustainable tactics and she always looks for innovative learning opportunities.
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