Photo by Despoina Nikolaou

Yiota Demetriou is an academic, multimedia artist, and Imagineer. She holds a PhD in Arts and Digital Humanities awarded by the University of Bristol. Her artistic work and research are audience-centric, focused on life stories and new ways of developing experiences of narratives with and for the public: on stage, in museums, archives, for screens, speakers, XR technologies, and for books. Her doctoral research focused on artistic interventions in oral history collections, the exhibition/curation, and engagement of these.

Demetriou has lectured across the arts, social sciences, and engineering/innovation on research-led subjects related to Performance Studies, Digital Humanities and Heritage, Creative Technologies and Innovation, at the University of Bristol, and Bath Spa University. Previously, Yiota held a postdoctoral position at Bath Spa University conducting research for two research centres, Making Books: Creativity, Print Culture, and the Digital, alongside the Centre for Culture and Creative Industries. She has also been a Research Fellow for UWE, on Audience Evaluation of Creative Technology and Immersive Experiences, as part of The Heritage Empath project. Demetriou has toured her creative and academic-based work globally and has conducted research as a fellow in China, USA, Korea, and Italy. She is a co-founder and board member of 3 academic and industry-faced networks, Futurist Advisory Board, RE-Cognition, CyArtHub; that promote multidisciplinary collaboration between creative and technological R&D, as well as the dissemination of knowledge, and providing platforms for ECRs. She is a resident at the Pervasive Media Studio and Bristol VR Lab, and has extensive experience as a creative consultant for tech-based collaborative projects, and gallery/museum exhibits, with a focus on audience engagement, participation, playfulness, immersion, and interaction.

Yiota designs human-centered collective experiences combining creative practices, narrative, and ubiquitous technologies, including spatial computing. Her performance project, Love Letters has toured the EU for over 7 years at renowned Festivals/Symposia and venues: Museum of Broken Relationships (Zagreb, Croatia), MIX 2017, Tempting Failure, i-Docs, Performance & Live Art Platform, Arnolfini, Watershed, Pervasive Media Studio, and Latitude. Love Letters invites audiences to delve into an installation of 350 letters written by past audiences to their loved ones that have been collected whilst touring internationally. Her most recent work is an interactive artist’s book called To You. Imbued with the reader’s warmth and affection it responds to body heat: the writing becomes visible and leaves temporal traces of the reader’s fingerprints. She has presented work and commissions at Bath Kids Literary Festival, Wickham Theatre, Bristol Old Vic, Somerset Gallery in London, and Rome’s National Gallery of Modern Art. As well as being invited to deliver talks, at Arnolfini (Bristol), Whitechapel Gallery (London) and Tate Modern (London). Yiota is interested in the social, political, ethical, cultural and theoretical implications of a growing digital world, specifically exploring the anthropological and performative factors of intersectional curation, and engaging with oral histories (bottom-up approaches to heritage), that can be engaged both spatially and temporally. She has published on women’s stories of war, contested borders in the Eastern Mediterranean region, and Cypriot women’s diaspora (Greek-speaking and Turkish-speaking). Her publications, collaborative R&D projects, and consultation approach extend to the application of creative practices in providing platforms for practice-based action research for Human-Computer Interaction and Interactive Media, offering creative experiments that form new kinds of symbiosis between humans and computers.