Management

Constantine Koukias was the Artistic Director and CEO of IHOS Music Theatre & Opera for 23 years in Australia.

Constantine’s avant-garde approach to the presentation of opera has resulted in hybrid productions such as Days and Nights with Christ, To Traverse Water, MIKROVION (Small Life – 36 Images in a Phantom Flux of Life), The Divine Kiss, and Tesla – Lightning in His Hand. His most recent large-scale work, The Barbarians, was inspired by Constantine Cavafy’s famous poem “Waiting for the Barbarians” and commissioned by the Museum of Old and New Art.

His works range from large-scale music-theatre and opera to mobile installation-art events.
His compositions have earned acclaim as being remarkable for their mesmerising, atmospheric qualities created by accompanying temporal and spatial production designs. In his recent works, exotic flavours have been introduced through Eastern timbres and melody-design.

In 1993, he was commissioned by the Sydney Opera House Trust to compose ICON, a large-scale music-theatre piece, to celebrate the 20th anniversary of the Sydney Opera House.

Additional music-theatre works include Kimisis – Falling Asleep, Borders, Orfeo, Rapture – Sonic Taxi Performance, Schwa – The Neutral Vowel, Antigone, and The Da Ponte Project. Prayer Bells, which draws on traditions of Latin, Hebrew, and Byzantine chant, had its USA premiere at the Chicago Cultural Centre.

In 2004, he was awarded a Sir Winston Churchill Fellowship. His Incantation II for soprano and digital delay won the International Valentino Bucchi Vocal Prize in Rome in 1997. His design credits include the internationally acclaimed Odyssey and Medea.

Susanne Maenen started her not-for-profit work as the secretary for the international NGO Surfrider Foundation, Chapter Holland.

During her work for the Surfrider Foundation, Susanne studied Cultural Anthropology at the University of Amsterdam. There, she had the opportunity to set-up and lead a development project for the Dutch NGO BothENDS in Uganda. She designed and executed a water resource-management research project and coordinated a variety of leading local NGOs in Kampala

She followed her bachelor’s degree with an International Development Studies master program at Wageningen University. Susanne expanded her organisational and coordinating experience into consultancy when she managed a team to produce policy advice for the Netherlands Environmental Assessment Agency (Planbureau voor de Leefomgeving).

Since finishing her master’s studies, Susanne has worked as a freelance consultant all over the world. She coordinated the set-up of an Ecovillage with a digital nomad and entrepreneur accelerator programme in Sri Lanka.