Danai is a postdoctoral researcher at the Institute of Environmental Studies at Vrije University of Amsterdam. The project she is part of “Perfect Storm”, focuses on the risk of cascading hazards of drought-to-flood events, focusing on hydro-social feedback; her role includes the exploration of storylines of drought-flood events via data visualisation and art-science.

Danai did her bachelor’s studies in Geography at the University of the Aegean in Greece; continued by a master’s program in Historical Demography at Ionian University, Greece. In 2018, she started her journey abroad in Munich, Vienna and Dresden, attending the M.Sc. in Cartography, where she was awarded a full scholarship from the Erasmus Mundus joint master. During her master’s, she fell in love with Polar Geography and developed her passion into a master’s thesis, “Developing Arctic Cylinders to map changes in the sea-ice and vegetation”. She published part of her thesis in the “Regional Studies Regional Science” Journal. Polar Geography continued to be her main interest. Conducting a fully-funded PhD at Durham University, from the DurhamArctic program (https://www.durham.ac.uk/research/institutes-and-centres/arctic/), in the Department of Geography on the “Arctic Cartographic Uncertainties”, where she used creative methods in geography and engaged most of her academic and artistic passions into a creative and innovative thesis.

Before joining IVM she was a lecturer of Geography at Teesside University in England. As part of her academic research she is creating and curating art-exhibitions on climate change, polar geography, cartography; where she is experimenting with mix-media and embodied practices of processing and communicating science. She has organised workshops and small conferences on those topics, and she has been using creative methods in her teaching and research, including collage and geo-poetry. Examples of her art-science work can be found at her website.

To contact Danai-Maria, please send her an email.

For more information about Heidi’s research activities: