Christos Ioannidis

He was born in Athens, Greece. He studied Physics in Athens University and Music in the University of Ottawa, Canada. He has been a high-school teacher since 1990. In 2004 he created and directed a student magazine called “Schooligans”, which has been published nationwide as an inset in the newspapers “Eleftherotipia” and “NEA”. In 2005 he created a music festival called “Schoolwave”. Highschool bands from Greece and Europe come to Athens every July and play their own music on a huge stage in front of thousands of schoolmates. In the past 5 years, Schoolwave has become the biggest high-school festival in Europe with over 2,5 million views on Youtube.

Monsieur Minimal

Monsieur Minimal a.k.a. Christos Τsitroudis was born and raised in Giannitsa, Greece. He has been writing and producing music as Monsieur Minimal for the last 5 years. He was one of the most talented and successful competitors of the Coca-Cola Sound Wave festival in 2007, with his songs ‘’Silk’’ and ‘’Love Is A Circle’’.

His first official release was in the City Campers compilation (The Sound Of Everything) in 2008. He was the artist that received the biggest attention from this project.

His debut album, titled ’’Lollipop’’, was released in 2008 by The Sound Of Everything and received impressive reviews from press and radio, while it soon became a best seller of the local indie scene. His music can be defined as mainly indie pop but with a lot of electronic influences and elements. But the key to his success are the simple, beautiful melodies and sweet pop vocals, which made this album a hit across a wide range of radio and tv stations in Greece. Following the success of his album, Status magazine, one of the most popular male magazines in Greece, voted him in category of the “face of the year 2009”.

Following the success of the debut album and the unprecedented hype he received from the Greek media as a new talent, he decided to record his second album, titled “Pasta Flora” in Greek. His music preserves the same successful ingredients and the lyrics convey the same meaning: Love! The album was released in 2010 and instantly received massive airplay form several radio stations across the country. Dimitra Galani, one of the greatest female singers of Greece with a career spanning more than 30 years in the music industry, sings one of the album songs titled “Mia Zoi”.

Although this project enjoys an early success, Monsieur Minimal is already writing new songs for his third album, released in 2011, which will be in English again, just like his debut album, Lollipop.

Alexis Stamatis

Alexis Stamatis is a well known Greek novelist, and poet born in Athens, Greece. He studied Architecture at the National Technical University of Athens and received graduate degrees in Architecture and Cinematography in London. He is the author of eight novels and six books of poetry; his work has been translated into English, French, Italian, Russian, Spanish, and Turkish. His second collection of poetry, The Architecture of Interior Spaces, was awarded the Nikiforos Vrettakos Poetry Prize in 1994. His novel American Fugue (Kastaniotis, 2006) was awarded an International Literature Award from the NEA and was published this year in the US. His play Dakrygona is been staged in Kefallinia’s street theater. His latest novel is Kill your darlings (Kastaniotis, 2009).

Alexis Stamatis has represented Greece at several international book fairs and literary seminars, including the International Writing Program at the University of Iowa, which he attended through a Fulbright Foundation Artists and Art-Scholars Award. As of Septermber 2010, Alexis also writes for the Huffington Post as a Contributing Editor.