USA Reel Poetry Festival

SISSY DOUTSIOU LIVE AT REELPOETRY INTERNATIONAL FILM FESTIVAL
Saturday 19 September 2026, 7:15 PM
Midtown Arts and Theater Center Houston (MATCH), Houston, Texas

Sissy Doutsiou brings her spoken word performance to the REELpoetry International Film Festival in Houston, opening a passage into a world where the boundary between the living and the non-living dissolves.

Performing in Greek and English, she moves through original spoken text, handcrafted ritual masks and creature figures born from the body's oldest knowledge of fear, protection, desire and play. Her creatures are beings from a reality made of compassion, solidarity and friendship instead of competition, and they come onto the stage as the living inverse of the systems her work confronts. What follows is visceral and politically charged, moving through personal experience, mythology, social resistance and eroticism, held together by a single ethos: existential tenderness against the violence of normality.

A pioneering figure of the Greek spoken word scene, Sissy Doutsiou is an actress, poet and curator based in Athens. She co-directs the Institute for Experimental Arts and curates the International Video Poetry Festival, one of the largest festivals of its kind in the world. In 2025 she released her debut spoken word LP, Insult of Public Modesty (Inner Ear Records), one of the first contemporary spoken word vinyl records in Greece.

Earlier the same day, at 4:00 PM, she also presents Paradise Now, a curated program of international poetry films from Greece, Iceland, Mexico and Turkey, on the need for space and time to overcome obstacles and historical traumas.

Full festival program: reelpoetry.org/2026-program