Stefanos Kouratzis is an award-winning visual storyteller, writer, educator and the Artistic Director of LiPhoFe — the Limassol Photography Festival, based in Cyprus. His work brings together long-term photographic projects, documentary narratives, and writing, often returning to place, memory, absence, and historical experience. It rests on one conviction, that the gaze is not innocent.

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His first photobook, Αμμόχωστος - Το Άλγος του Νόστου | Ammochostos - The Algos of Nostos (2024) ISBN: 978-9925-632-16-9, sold out in December 2024, five months after publication. It is held in selected library collections, among them the Museum of Modern Art Library in New York, the Academy of Athens Library, the Cyprus Library, and the Severios Library. He studied at the Focus School of Art Photography, Video and New Technologies in Athens.

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In 2018 he was a participating artist in the Cyprus Pavilion, “I Am Where You Are”, at the 16th Venice Architecture Biennale. In 2026 his work appears in “PHOTOMINO EUROPE” at FREELENS Gallery, within the Triennial of Photography Hamburg. In 2021 he contributed a series of photographs to the first retrospective exhibition “Past-forward: Stavros Economou Unarchived”, at the State Gallery of Contemporary Cypriot Art (SPEL) in Nicosia, with the work also projected at Le Corbusier's Unité d'habitation in Marseille.

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As Artistic Director of LiPhoFe, the Limassol Photography Festival, he co-curated the main exhibition “Place or Landscape” in 2023, and in 2024 curated all seven exhibitions of the festival under the theme “Athlos”, authoring the accompanying texts. His curatorial work also includes “From Vision to Legacy: 125 Years of The English School Nicosia” (2026) at the Centre of Visual Arts and Research (CVAR), Severis Foundation, Marat Hasanov's “Duality” in Limassol in 2024, and Sebastian Rich's “Fleeing to Safety” in 2022, presented in two venues with UNHCR Cyprus and the Universitas Foundation.

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The Press and Information Office of Cyprus has commissioned projects including “ELLE, Cyprus in the Feminine” and “Kticic”, exhibited at the Nicosia International Festival, the Austrian National Library in Vienna, the Círculo de Bellas Artes in Madrid, the Museum of Byzantine Culture in Thessaloniki, and The House of Cyprus in Athens.

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His earlier press work includes collaborations with AFP, Reuters, AP, Xinhua, France 24, ARTE, and BBC Radio. He has covered conflict, political, and humanitarian events in the wider region, including the Lebanon War, the Gaza Strip, the Bam earthquake in Iran, and an embedded assignment aboard a US aircraft carrier during Operation Iraqi Freedom. His articles on photography and journalism have been published in Cyprus, Greece, the United States, the United Kingdom, and Poland.

 

His photography has received recognition from the Gomma Photography Grant, the PDN Photo Annual, IPA, PX3, and the Fujifilm EuroPress Awards Cyprus. His photographs are held in private collections in Cyprus and abroad.

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As an educator he teaches photography, history, theory, aesthetics, and visual storytelling at Aigaia School of Fine Arts.

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He is a member of the Union of Cyprus Journalists and the International Federation of Journalists, and a former member of the Performance Evaluation Committee (EAP) of the THYMELI Scheme, serving under the Cyprus Theatre Organisation from 2022 to 2023 and under the Deputy Ministry of Culture from 2024 to 2025.

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Photography unlocks the chains of reality.