Nayia Yiakoumaki

Nayia Yiakoumaki has been the Director of the Hellenic Center in London since September 2022. From 2005 to 2022, she was a curator at Whitechapel Gallery, where from 2016 she also served as Head of Curatorial Studies and founding director of the MA Curating Art and Public Programs, developed in collaboration with London South Bank University. At Whitechapel, Yiakoumaki developed an innovative program of research exhibitions for the Archive Gallery, worked on commissions, and from 2011 to 2020 devised and directed the NEON Curatorial Exchange & Award – an annual curatorial exchange program, founded and funded by the NEON Organization and delivered by Whitechapel Gallery. She also co-directed the Athens Biennale from 2016 to 2017.

Yiakoumaki has worked in arts education for over thirty years. She has conceived over forty exhibitions and commissions, including “John Latham: Anarchive” (2010), “Rothko in Britain” (2012), “Aspen Magazine: 1965–1971” (2012), “Black Eyes & Lemonade: Curating Popular Art” (2013), “Stephen Willats: Concerning Our Present Way of Living” (2014), “Intellectual Barbarians: The Kibbo Kift Kindred” (2015–2016), “Imprint 93” (2016), “Guerrilla Girls: Is It Even Worse in Europe?” (2016–2017), “Killed Negatives: Unseen Images of 1930s America, Staging Jackson Pollock” (2018), “Andreas Lolis: Prosaic Origins” (2018), “Queer Spaces: London, 1980s–Today” (2019), “Fluxus Audio and Scores” (2019), “Exercising Freedom: Encounters With Art, Artists, and Communities” (2020), “Phantoms of Surrealism” (2021), “Out of the Margins: Performance in London’s Institutions 1990s–2010s” (2022), “The House of Le Bas” (2023), featuring the work of artists Delaine and Damian Le Bas, “Vlassis Caniaris: Selected Works 1960s–1980s” (2023), “Maria Loizidou: The Place I Am Not” (2024), in collaboration with the Freud Museum, London, and “Rena Papaspyrou: Images Through Matter” (2025).