Elpida Orfanidou

Elpida Orfanidou is a choreographer and performer with a professional background in pharmacy and piano repertory, based between Berlin and Athens. Her work alchemizes crafts, film, ethnography, voice, healing practices, and somatics, often through a biographical lens. Collaboration is central to her work – seeking the magic of kindness as a motor for creativity, cultivating environments where care, humor, and genuine curiosity lead the way. Her practices celebrates the casual mystics of everyday life, staying fascinated by encounters – between people, buildings, landscapes, cameras, surfaces, genres – believing that the space between holds the highest potential.

Her projects have been presented at venues and festivals such as Hebbel am Ufer, Sophiensaele, Tanz im August (Berlin), PACT Zollverein (Essen), Gessnerallee (Zurich), Festival Far (Nyon), lieu unique (Nantes), and SuperCell Festival (Brisbane). She co-conceived “Life As It Is Lived, a Film-Performance in Two Acts” with Igor Dobričić (Onassis Air mentor), presented at Theater im Delphi Berlin with the support of Onassis Air Athens. Her choreographic works “Songtellers” and “Sculpturing Songs” explore the intersection of singing, storytelling, and movement. “Elpid’arc,” a film-performance on casual mystics together with Juan Perno, and “Pharmacist or Balloonist, A Choreographic Herbal Pharmacy,” have been co-produced and presented at the Onassis Cultural Center. She also co-choreographed “Duet #3: The Artisan is Present” (together with Fabrice Mazliah and Marialena Marouda) at Mousonturm Frankfurt, as well as “The Oceanographies Institute” (together with Marouda and Charlie Usher) and “To Come And See” (together with Simone Truong, Adina Secretan, Anna Massoni, and Eilit Marom). As part of her 2024 TANZPRAXIS Berlin research, she presented “ANAMNESIOLOGISTS,” a performative journey through the gardens of memory, in collaboration with Effi Rabsilber in Athens. As a performer, she has collaborated with Hermann Heisig, Daniel Wittkopp, Pieter Ampe, Tim Etchells, and Meg Stuart, and recently appeared in Sofia Exarchou’s award-winning film “Animal.”

In 2024, Elpida completed studies in acupuncture and filmmaking in Athens, searching for the trigger points of the moving image. That same year, she led the workshop “Something as Nothing as Everything” in the SYNASKI program at COCHLEA studia. She is currently working on her short movie exploring poetries of the banal.

Elpida Orfanidou is a participant of the Onassis AiR Extended Research Residencies program for 2024/25 as a collaborator in Ant Hampton's project “Detouristiki”.