Despina Theocharidou (b. 1987, Sofia, Bulgaria) is an interdisciplinary artist working across painting, video, installation, and performance. Her practice explores memory, trauma, and identity through a collision of classical techniques and digital aesthetics, questioning the boundaries between fine art, internet culture, and mass media.

Influenced by Basquiat, Warhol, Klimt, Emin, Bourgeois, and pop surrealism, she integrates digital collage, AI-generated imagery, and personal iconography, reinterpreting themes of nostalgia, childhood symbolism, and confessional storytelling. Drawing from her background in advertising, digital culture, and multilingual identity, her work critically examines the saturation of images in contemporary life, the material vs. the virtual, and the aesthetics of self-exposure.

Her paintings combine historical oil techniques with pop-cultural iconography, often incorporating gold leaf, iridescent pigments, and Byzantine-inspired elements as a commentary on value, ornamentation, and historical memory. Her video, performance, and installation works expand these themes, exploring surveillance, psychological landscapes, and the fragmented self in digital spaces.

Theocharidou’s work is a constant negotiation between personal and collective histories, humor and trauma, tradition and modernity—a confessional yet critical excavation of contemporary existence.