Eirene is a product of the Hellenic Diaspora--born in Johannesburg, South Africa, raised in Athens and educated in New York City. She holds two Masters degrees, one in literature and another in journalism from Stony Brook University and the University of Missouri, Columbia, respectively. She has worked as a writer, editor, journalist, and English instructor across the world for over two decades. She has taught for the American College of Greece, the Institute of North American Studies in Barcelona, Al Quds University, the University of Maryland in Kaiserslautern, Germany, various SUNY and CUNY colleges as well as the NYC public high schools.

It took the penetrating introspection that accompanied a psychic crisis to reveal her latent artistic talents. While primarily self-taught, she has attended various classes at the National Academy of Art, the Art Students’ League, Bric Ceramics Center, and the Lower East Side Print Shop. However, it was reading the word “encaustic” on the museum label of the vibrant Fayum portraits in the Egyptian wing of the Metropolitan that sparked her curiosity for this obscure technique. Her good fate and curiosity led her to a series of workshops from R&F Studio and Paints, the major supplier of encaustic media, located only an hour and a half away in Kingston, NY. From those foundational workshops and a period of experimental discovery, she manifested a natural proclivity to encaustic, an ancient Greek technique that she intuitively mastered believing that it was in her DNA all along.