"Medusa MMXX" Painting

Born and raised in Athens, Greece, Markella Lousidis (Lousidi) is a Greek-American painter whose practice explores preservation as a force that shapes both collective and individual identity. Working primarily with acrylic paint, she examines how histories, myths and personal memories are constructed, maintained and transformed over time.

Drawing from her experience of growing up between cultures, her earlier work questioned national identity through themes of tourism, gentrification and cultural heritage, exploring what societies choose to preserve and what gradually becomes performance.

Her recent work turns towards personal memory and the difficulty of forgetting in a digital age. Photographs that continually resurfaced from past relationships and experiences became the starting point for paintings that question what happens when memories we might otherwise lose or reshape remain permanently accessible.

By translating these memories into paint, Lousidis slows their circulation and creates space to transform rather than simply preserve them. Her work explores the tension between the fluid nature of human memory and the permanence of digital records.

Her education has followed an independent and international path, combining classical and contemporary art training in Athens, Paris, Madrid, Berlin, Florence and London between 2022 and 2024.

In 2025, she completed the Graduate Diploma in Art & Design, Fine Art pathway, at the Royal College of Art in London, graduating with Merit.

In 2026, she was selected as one of six artists for Columbia University School of the Arts’ Advanced Painting Intensive in New York, where she developed The Inability to Forget in the Digital Age.

Lousidis' work has been exhibited internationally in Greece, Italy, the United Kingdom and the United States.