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Artist-designer, curator, educator, and researcher specialising in creative leadership, socially engaged practice, and collaborative design.

I am an interdisciplinary practitioner working across socially engaged art and design, photography, filmmaking, and curatorial practice. My work operates between situated and participatory cultural production, higher education, and research, with over 13 years of experience developing interdisciplinary programmes, participatory methodologies, and international collaborations. I focus on how creative practice engages with questions of access, cultural infrastructure, and the socio-political conditions that shape knowledge production.

I am the founder and artistic director of Xarkis NGO (Cyprus), a nomadic cultural platform through which I have led and art directed over 30 public programmes across rural and urban contexts since 2013, including Xarkis Festival and PIKNIK. Working with artists, designers, educators, activists and communities, I develop site-responsive and participatory projects that foreground situated knowledge, inclusive authorship, and cultural innovation.

I serve as Vice-President of the Visual Artists and Art Theorists Association (phytorio) (2024–2026), where I contribute to advocacy for cultural workers in Cyprus. I also engage in cultural policy discussions in an independent lobbying group representing visual art and design NGOs, advocating for equitable frameworks that support artists and creative practitioners.

My practice combines experimental and poetic documentary approaches with participatory, site-specific methodologies. Rooted in socio-ecological inquiry and a feminist ethics of care, I work with communities, often in peripheral contexts, to engage situated knowledges and reimagine local culture and heritage in contemporary forms. I have directed several documentary films currently touring international festivals, with recent work broadcast across Cyprus. In 2025, I presented my first major solo exhibition, sympraxis, at SIC. Contemporary Culture in Nicosia, alongside subsequent international presentations. In 2026, I presented the solo exhibition Light in Waiting, exploring the blueprint of sympraxis in the context of Arvier.

I am currently an AHRC-funded PhD candidate at University of the Arts London, based at Central Saint Martins, where my research develops sympraxis as a collaborative, site-specific approach to practice. Drawing from anthropology, co-design, and ethnographic methods, sympraxis proposes a reflexive and place-based mode of working grounded in co-action, care, and relational knowledge production. It explores how creative practice can engage deeply with local cultural politics while supporting resilient, community-led futures.

Since 2015, I have taught across BA and MA programmes at Central Saint Martins, London College of Communication, the University of Westminster, and European University Cyprus. My teaching spans collaborative practice, interdisciplinary research methods, co-design, and socio-environmental approaches. I design and lead learning environments grounded in co-inquiry, positionality, and the integration of theory and practice, supporting students to develop critically engaged and context-responsive work.

I currently teach in the BA unit of Creative Unions at Central Saint Martins where I design and deliver sessions on collaborative practice through lectures, workshops, and facilitated group learning. I support students in developing group film-based projects addressing social and environmental challenges through an intersectional lens, and assess and grade individual reflective essays.

My broader research and teaching focus on creative leadership as a relational and infrastructural practice, and on how pedagogical and cultural frameworks can support inclusive, socially engaged, and context-sensitive forms of practice.

I am particularly interested in shaping creative leadership education as a situated, collective, and critically engaged practice, and in leading learning environments that support emerging practitioners to navigate complexity, develop agency, and work responsively across diverse cultural contexts.

Christina Skarpari

christinaskarpari2@gmail.com
0035797676011

Founder of Xarkis NGO
22 Petraki Giallourou
Nicosia, Strovolos — 2040 Cyprus

Work

8:51’ minutes (2025)

A film by Christina Skarpari

Produced by Xarkis NGO | Audio-visual editing: Phivos Philitas, Christina Skarpari | Editing assistance: Andreas Kleanthous | With the participation of: Pericles Gavriel

agrelia, as you like it is an intimate excursion into the unfolding relationship between forager-artisan Pericles Gavriel and myself, while foraging wild asparagus. Set in the Cypriot countryside οf Larnaca district, the film resists extractivist means of filming, offering a shared journey shaped by trust, reciprocity, and care. As the landscape shifts, so does our bond—through glances, offerings, and silences. The return home completes a cycle of gestures that honour the ethics of witnessing, memory, and companionship.