about

Sissy Doutsiou is an actress, spoken word artist, and multidisciplinary performer based in Athens, Greece — a pioneering figure in the Greek spoken word scene whose work moves fluidly between theatrical performance, experimental poetry, ritual, and visual art. Performing in both Greek and English, with English supertitles for international audiences, she has built a sustained presence on stages across Europe, the United States, and Asia.

Her multimedia spoken word performances are visceral, politically charged events: layered with ritual masks, visual art, and live sonic textures, they navigate the terrain between the erotic and the existential, the mythological and the urgently contemporary. Her work is guided by a governing ethos — existential tenderness against the violence of normality — in which desire becomes a political language and the body a site of both resistance and vulnerability. Socially aware and deliberately provocative, her performances refuse the boundaries between art forms, dissolving theater into poetry, ceremony into critique.

Among her most celebrated theatrical achievements is her portrayal of Gregor Samsa in Metamorphosis by Franz Kafka, hailed by the Franz Kafka Society of Prague as "The best Metamorphosis that we have ever seen. Kafka would love Sissy Doutsiou as Gregor Samsa." The president of the Theater Critics Association in Greece wrote: "Sissy Doutsiou gives a real recital of the whole physical approach of the suffering and crucified human, reaching the limits of acting self-sacrifice, not even hesitating to crumple herself brutally." New theatrical work is forthcoming in autumn and winter 2026.

She has played roles ranging from Jean Genet to Bertolt Brecht across major Greek and Cypriot repertory theaters, with a particular focus on In-Yer-Face Theatre — including 4.48 Psychosis by Sarah Kane, one of her signature monologues. She holds a BSc in Astrophysics from the University of Sussex and graduated from the prestigious Delos Drama School in 2009. She has deepened her practice through workshops with Natalie Portman, Jodie Foster, and Helen Mirren, and expanded her creative and cinematographic vision through sessions with David Lynch, Martin Scorsese, and Spike Lee.

Doutsiou has developed her own acting methodology, drawing on extensive research and travel in Indonesia, India, and Mexico, which she teaches internationally. Her literary output includes four critically acclaimed poetry collections, the erotic and political short story collection The Voyeur, and the psychological feminist thriller The Sisters of Cain — a fierce exploration of love, authority, and violence. In spring 2025 she released her debut spoken word LP Insult of Public Modesty through Inner Ear Records, a landmark release and one of the first contemporary spoken word vinyl records in Greece. She also released the spoken word single "Paid Rape," featured as a video poem on the European Poetry Platform Versopolis.

A founding member of the Institute for Experimental Arts, she is the curator of the International Video Poetry Festival and the International Experimental Film Festival in Athens. In 2026 she performed at the International Poetry Festival at Theatre Deli in London and at the Brighton Festival, extending an international performance history that includes Judson Memorial Church in New York, the London School of Economics, and the 1st Biennial Destroy Athens. She has collaborated with organizations including the American company Living Theatre and the Institute for Experimental Theatre in Calcutta.

Formative encounters with Suprijo Samjadar of the Grotowski Theatre, anthropologist David Graeber, surrealist poet Nanos Valoritis — friend of André Breton — and Jeffrey Perkins of the Fluxus art group have profoundly shaped her artistic and intellectual formation. She is married to Tasos Sagris, theater director, activist, and writer, through whom she became involved with the Void Network Collective and the self-organized theatre Embros.