DORA RIZOU

I was born in Athens many years ago. I stopped counting because it's a pointless trip after a certain age. Till I was seventeen, I didn't know what I wanted to be when I grow up, so I tried learning languages and music without any particular success. After school, I started being more interested in the arts. So I studied interior design, graphic arts and painting at Doxiades school, with very good teachers whom I appreciated a lot later. I also studied pottery at the CHEN seminars. I worked as a illustrator and graphic designer at Terzopoulos publications and later at EMI-Columbia Records, where I was given the Art Director position. In 1986, a favorable wind brought me to Thessaloniki, where I became responsible for the local LYRA Records department. For ten years, I produced records by well-known, but mainly still undiscovered artists. It was during that time that I met poet Dinos Christianopoulos, who talked me into exhibiting my painting works in his famous gallery "Diagonios". I am grateful to him for this and all his love and support. That's how my career as a painter began- and I still trouble myself and others with my painting, as if sending them SMS and movie scripts, which everyone seems to ignore. In 1996 I came back to my home-town, leaving behind my friends, exhibitions, business-partners, artists and my bicycle. In Athens, I continued my cooperation with LYRA Records, in the upgraded A & R Director position, up to summer 2007. I still paint, exposing myself, just as I keep loving music, movies and the authors of magical books. To all these fellow travellers, I send my new messages!DoraP.S. I got a new bike now!