BIOGRAPHY
In 1996 Athens and Sparta signed a peace treaty to end the Peloponnesian War, 2,400 years after Athens’ surrender in 404 BC. This Greece—where the past is just as present as the present—was Constantine’s childhood home and remains his creative crucible.
Constantine is a mixed-media artist, currently based in New York City. In his art he works with stories, images, Greek Bronze Age hieroglyphs, and languages thought to be lost to time. He is among the last speakers of Arberishte, a Greek sister language of medieval Albanian. Among his subjects are the lost words and sounds of Arberishte, as well as other forgotten languages of Greece, his work breathing life into ancient cultures and systems of knowledge that have faced erasure.
Constantine’s art has toured the world, visiting galleries in Moscow (Gallery «СОЛЬ»), Berlin, Tokyo, and across Finland. His series of works based on the Finnish epic, the Kalevala, is part of the permanent collection at the State Museum of Urban Sculpture in St. Petersburg. His most recent individual exhibition took place at Galerie Robert Art Room in Paris, November, 2022.
Constantine—known in the literary world as Peter Constantine—has had a decorated career as a writer, translator, and activist for a diversified linguistic ecosystem in our world. He is a Guggenheim Fellow and the recipient of two National Endowment for the Arts fellowships, the PEN Translation Prize and the National Translation Award, as well as national literary prizes from Kosovo and Greece.