I am a Lecturer in Jazz Studies at the University of Manchester, where I convene the undergraduate course units Jazz Ensemble, Jazz Improvisation, Theory and Analysis, and Jazz Historiography and Criticism, as well as teach broadly on topics in Balkan and popular music(s). In my capacity as the Director of Performance I oversee the administrative operation of music performance courses in the department for undergraduate studies.

A musician at heart, my research interests are consistently informed by my practice and experience as an improvising percussionist, whether in jazz, Balkan and contemporary music or their fusion. Having been awarded the Berger-Berger-Carter Research Fellowship at the Institute of Jazz Studies to complete archival research at the Rutgers University Libraries (Newark, New Jersey, US), and a British Academy/Leverhulme small research grant to extend my research at the Schomburg Centre for Research in Black Culture of the New York Public Library and the Library of Congress (US), I am now completing my first monograph on the Modern Jazz Quartet’s album Fontessa (Oxford Studies in Recorded Jazz series, Oxford University Press). In my book, I examine the Modern Jazz Quartet by measuring its achievements against the increased commitment to social change of the 1950s. I have previously published my work in peer-reviewed academic journals, both nationally and internationally, on topics in jazz and television, jazz performance and analysis, jazz historiography and criticism, jazz improvisation, theory and cognition, jazz diasporas, and jazz and cultural geography.

I have secured funds from the Simon Endowment to lead a diverse group of researchers, musicians and teachers including British Bahraini composer Yazz Ahmed and the four times Grammy awarded Puerto Rican percussionist Carlos Maldonado, to investigate modern diasporas in the British Jazz Scene (2021-2022 & 2022-2023). This collaborative, practice-based, research, included commissioning and performing new music that imagined local diasporic encounters sonically, instigating new collaborations with national partners and institutions.

I have secondary research interests in topics in improvisation and psychology. I am member of a trans-disciplinary research team that includes the Manchester Camerata, the Salford Institute for Dementia, the Martin Harris Centre for Music and Drama and the Dementia and Ageing Research Team (University of Manchester) that supervises an ESRC-funded PhD project entitled ‘Mapping Moments: Establishing new directions for dementia studies through participatory action research’ (2021-2025), and have also been awarded funding by the National Institute for Health and Care Research to investigate the impact of an improvised music-making programme on care home staff and family carer well-being (2022-2024). Upon completion of my PhD at the University of Nottingham (2018) I was awarded a Leverhulme Early Career Fellowship to research spatial navigation in improvising musicians.  

Before my employment in higher education, I developed and assisted with the organisation of educational and other impact initiatives with the London-based Grand Union Orchestra (2007-2009) as well as with the mentoring charity ReachOut (2012-2013). I have participated and later taught in the ‘Jazz Features Workshops’, a bi-communal programme organised by the American Embassy in Cyprus and Jazz at Lincoln Centre that featured distinguished US artists, and required coordination with the US Embassy, the UN and Jazz at Lincoln Centre, as well as with teachers and administrators from schools in the Turkish Cypriot and Greek Cypriot communities.

A French-Greek, I was born in Chambéry, France and was raised between Thessaloniki Greece and Nicosia, Cyprus, growing up in a multicultural environment. I benefited from early musical studies on the piano and subsequently studied drums with Brian Abrahams and mallet percussion with Daniela Ganeva. I earned masters degrees from the Trinity College of Music, King’s College London and an Artist Diploma from the State University of New York where I was fortunate to study with Hal Galper, Jon Faddis and John Abercrombie, all with the generous support of the Nicolas Economou Foundation, State University of New York, and Trinity College of Music. I completed my PhD at the University of Nottingham in 2018, where I was awarded the Vice-chancellor's Award for Research Excellence and the Leventis Foundation doctoral scholarship. My PhD focused on the life and work of vibraphonist Milt Jackson. 

Fellow - Advance HE (2022)

Associate Fellow - Higher Education Academy (2016)

I am responsible for overseeing the delivery of our performance provision at undergraduate level, as well as jazz courses at undergraduate and postgraduate levels. I supervise a ranged of undergraduate, postgraduate, and doctoral dissertations on topics incuding Jazz and Popular Music, topics in Music and Psychology, Performance and Improvisation. 

Summary of Units taught:

2018-present, Jazz Historiography and Criticism (MUSC30510)

2019-present, Jazz Improvisation, Theory and Analysis (MUSC21501)

2018-present, Solo Performance 1 (MUSC10600)

2018-present, Solo Performance 2 (MUSC20600)

2018-present, Recital (MUSC30600)

2019-present, Jazz Ensemble (MUSC20610)

2018-present, Dissertation (MUSC30400)

 2018-2019, Case Studies in Musicology: Texts and Histories (MUSC60082), Postgraduate 6-lecture block: ‘The Jazz Studies are Dead, Long Live the Jazz Studies’

2019-2020, Dissertation or Critical Edition (MUSC 40110)

2018-2019, Approaches to Musicology: Jazz and the Recorded Medium (MUSC10511)

2018-2019, Music and Its Contexts: Balkan Music(s) and the Politics of Imagination (MUSC10512)