Eleanna Pitsikaki
Award Winner Qanun Virtuoso | Lecturer | Cultural Mediator | Educator | Explorer of Sound & Soul | Artistic Director 

Eleanna Pitsikaki is one of the most distinctive voices of the qanun on today’s global music scene. Rooted in jazz culture and shaped by memory, tradition, and improvisation, her work embraces transcultural expression as a living, evolving language.

Born and raised in Crete and now based in Germany, she approaches the qanun as a living instrument — creating a musical dialogue where East meets West, makam meets jazz, and ancestral sound unfolds into bold contemporary forms. As a performer, educator, and expert in transcultural mediation, Eleanna builds bridges between worlds, on stage, in academia, and beyond.

The Sound of a Journey

Her debut album, Àroma, unfolds as a sonic diary – deeply personal and crafted with great care, has received the Silver Award from the Global Music Awards and has also been nominated for the Preis der deutschen Schallplattenkritik.

Stages

Eleanna’s journey has been anything but linear: from performing among the ancient stones of the Odeon of Herodes Atticus in Athens, to the Schleswig-Holstein Festival and Rheingau Festival, to Sharq Taronalari Festival, appearing as a soloist with the Plovdiv Academy Orchestra in Bulgaria, representing Greece at the Qanun Festival in Ankara and Istanbul, and performing across Europe — including the Elbphilharmonie Hamburg, Luxembourg, Switzerland, France, Belgium, Austria and other.

Collaborations

She has shared the stage with iconic artists such as Yasmin Levy, Ross Daly,  Evanthia Reboutsika, Pantelis Thalassinos, Yorgos Kazantzis, Sokratis Sinopoulos, Oumeima El Khalil, Nil Venditti, Bar Avni, Yurdal Tokcan, Göksel Baktagir, László Fenyő, Shantel, Abeer Nehme and many others.

Since 2023, she has been a member of the Trickster Orchestra, an ensemble that fuses transtraditional and  contemporary jazz. Their work led to a recording with the legendary ECM Records.
Previously, she was a founding member of the Bridges Kammerorchester  in Frankfurt. She was active for seven years as a musician, arranger, music educator, and a key voice in shaping a transcultural vision

What She Does

Alongside her performance career, Pitsikaki is deeply committed to education, research, and cultural mediation. She has taught qanun, Ottoman makam, transcultural music ensembles, and intercultural music pedagogy at institutions including the University of music Mainz, Freies Musikzentrum Munich, University of music and Dance Cologne, Landesmusikakademie, and Univeristy of Music Karlsruhe.

She is currently completing her PhD University of music Mainz, focusing on transcultural music, migration, and belonging. In parallel, she serves as Artistic Director of the OMOPO Orchestra, co-leading the ensemble with Abathar Kmash, and actively contributes to European research initiatives exploring cultural education and social cohesion through the arts. She was selected as a scholarship holder for the first Transcultural Music Academy of the Deutsche Staatsphilharmonie Rheinland-Pfalz (2024–2026).

Eleanna regularly leads innovative formats such as Transcultural Session and works as a co-researcher at the University of Cologne on the project Advancing Cultural Literacy for Social Inclusion through Dialogical Arts Education, part of the dialoguing@rts program. She is also an active member of the dialoguingarts community at Leuphana University Lüneburg, engaging in interdisciplinary and artistic exchange.

Where It All Began

Eleanna began her musical journey in her mother’s choir — with a qanun on her lap and a stage beneath her feet.

She studied World Music at the Popakademie Baden-Württemberg in Mannheim and completed an Erasmus semester in the Musician 3.0 program at HKU Conservatory in Utrecht. She later earned a Master’s degree in Jazz Improvisation from the University of Music and Dance in Cologne.

Eleanna has attended numerous seminars at the Labyrinth Musical Workshop, studying under the renowned Göksel Baktagir. She holds a diploma in Byzantine Music and has additional training in early music education, elementary music pedagogy, and systematic psychology.