Sophia Boutsakis

Sophia Boutsakis is a Vancouver-based visual artist of Greek and Anglo descent. Born and raised in North Vancouver, she is privileged to reside and create as an uninvited guest on the traditional, ancestral, and unceded territory of the Squamish, Musqueam, and Tsleil-Waututh Nations.

Sophia holds a BFA from Emily Carr University of Art + Design. She is a recipient of awards including the Alvin Balkind Memorial Scholarship, the Brissenden Scholarship Award, the Christopher Foundation Scholarship Award and the Gordon Smith Outstanding Visual Artist Scholarship Award. Recent group exhibitions include Intermediate States (part of Capture Photography Festival, 2022) on Granville Island, Take The Egg at ECUAD’s Neighborhood Gallery (2022), and Familiar Faces at The Art Shop (2023).

Sophia’s multidisciplinary practice includes painting, drawing, sculpture, photography and print media, and her process is often an exploration of repeated motifs across these various mediums. 

Much of the subject matter within her work references girlhood: the period when a person is a girl, and not yet a woman, or the state of being a ‘girl’. Parallels between the terms ‘girl’ and ‘emerging artist’ are drawn, as the latter could be defined as an artist in the early stages of their career, similar to how a girl is a person in the early stages of their life. Both of these identifiers come with varying degrees of vulnerability, innocence, potential, freedom, barriers, and dependence.