Magda Parasidis

Magda Parasidis is a visual artist, designer and cultural worker, born in Athens, Greece. She immigrated to New York City in 1980, settling in a public housing project in Queens, but currently lives and works in Columbus, Ohio.

Of her work, she shares, “Text, urban landscapes and out of focus images show up regularly in my work as the aesthetic vocabulary I employ to explore themes of urban poverty, the home and memory. The language-based work, rooted in critique, considers the connections between the personal, the political and the aesthetic, while subverting the systems of power that make some lives visible and others not. With a practice anchored in photography, I reimagine the urban ghetto I have known as home as a space of poetic revelation, transforming the housing projects from structures of oppression into sites of ecstatic reverie and resistance.”

Magda holds a graduate degree in Advanced Artistic Studies from the Istituto Europeo di Design in Milan. Her text-based art and photography practice focusses on the intersection of economic and racial justice with poor people’s rights in the feminist perspective. She received a 2018 and 2019 Greater Columbus Arts Council grant, and a 2021 Ohio Arts Council Individual Excellence Award. Her work has been recognised in statewide juried exhibitions and is held in both private and public collections.