Yiannis Toumazis was born in Famagusta. He is Professor of Art History and Theory at Frederick University. Since 1994, he has been the Director of NiMAC [Nicosia Municipal Arts Centre, Associated with the Pierides Foundation], the leading contemporary art centre in Cyprus, as well as of the Pierides Foundation, one of the country’s oldest private cultural institutions.
He studied Civil Engineering at the National Technical University of Athens, Scenography at the Utrecht School of Arts in the Netherlands, and Aesthetics and Art Theory at the University of Amiens in France, where he completed his doctoral dissertation on Marcel Duchamp. His research focuses on current developments in modern and contemporary art, both in Cyprus and on the international art scene. More specifically, his work explores the socio-political dimensions of contemporary art within the global artistic context.
Since 2018, he has served as Coordinator of the PhD Programme in Applied Arts at Frederick University. Over the past three decades, he has conceived, organised, and curated more than one hundred contemporary art exhibitions in Cyprus and abroad. In 2011, he was the Curator of the Cyprus National Pavilion at the 54th Venice Biennale of Art.
He has also been actively involved in museology and museum studies. Among the many museums and exhibitions he has curated are the award-winning THALASSA Municipal Museum in Ayia Napa and the renovation of the Ceramics Gallery of the Cyprus Museum in Nicosia. From 2014 to 2019, he served as President of the Board of Directors of the Cyprus Theatre Organisation (THOC). Since May 2015, he has been Vice-President of the Bicommunal Technical Committee on Culture.
In 2011, the French Republic awarded him the title of Knight of the Order of Arts and Letters (Chevalier de l’Ordre des Arts et des Lettres) for his contribution to culture. In 2020, he became a member of the jury for the Hasselblad Award, the world’s most prestigious photography award, in Gothenburg, Sweden. In the same year, he was unanimously elected Corresponding Member of the Cyprus Academy of Sciences, Letters and Arts.
His recent publications include the volume Glyn Hughes 1931–2014, a comprehensive study of the work of the Welsh artist Glyn Hughes, whose contribution was significant to the development of art in Cyprus, as well as his research on the identification and documentation of 219 important works by Greek Cypriot and Greek artists that were returned from the Turkish Cypriot Community to the Greek Cypriot Community, published in the volume In Culture We Trust.
