Born in Athens in 1959. He studied law at the Law School of the University of Athens, piano and European music theory at the Hellenic Conservatory and with Υannis Ioannidis, and Byzantine and folk music with Simon Karas. With a scholarship from the Peloponnesian Folklore Foundation, he continued his studies in Paris at the École des hautes études en sciences sociales, where in 1987 he completed his doctoral dissertation in Ethnomusicology on “The Lyra in Crete and the Dodecanese.”
He collaborated with the Peloponnesian Folklore Foundation on musical fieldwork in the Greek-speaking villages of Southern Italy, in the Peloponnese and among the refugees of Northern Thrace. He taught at the Department of Social Anthropology of the University of the Aegean (1989–1992). In 1992 he was elected Assistant Professor and in 1998 Associate Professor of Ethnomusicology at the Department of Music Studies, School of Philosophy, University of Athens.
From 1979 onwards he collaborated with public and private radio and television on the production of programmes devoted to traditional music. He participated in Greek and international conferences, scholarly meetings and symposia, and curated exhibitions of folk instruments as well as festivals, musical tributes and concerts of Greek and international traditional music throughout Greece and abroad.
Professor at the National and Kapodistrian University of Athens and Director of the Division of Ethnomusicology and Cultural Anthropology.
