Constantinos Emmanuelle

Constantinos (Costas) Emmanuelle is currently the Lead Teacher for the Visual Arts Department at Melbourne Polytechnic in Melbourne, Australia. As a practising artist, Costas has explored and investigated his cultural heritage through disciplines such as, illustration, photography, drawing, painting, graphic design and digital imaging.

Costas’ most ambitious creative journey so far has been a personal crusade to document the living memories of his parent’s generation in a cultural arts project called ‘Tales of Cyprus’. This multi-disciplinary art project explores his parent’s homeland of Cyprus and its culture and traditional way of life prior to the 1950’s. In this project Costas’ also documents stories of migration and new beginnings as many of his target subjects left Cyprus in the 1940s, 50s and 60s to resettled and start new lives in countries such as Australia, the United Kingdom, South Africa, Europe, Canada and the United States of America.

Costas’ first exhibition for Tales of Cyprus took place at the Chapel off Chapel gallery in Prahran (Melbourne) in 2014. The exhibition included original drawings, paintings and photography. Large panels displayed reproductions of rare old family photos with various quotations and translations derived from personal interviews Costas conducted with members of the Cypriot diaspora. The topic of displacement, migration and cultural identity was also explored in the exhibition.

More recently, Costas has written, designed and self-published a hard-bound book titled “Tales of Cyprus: A tribute to a bygone era.” The book contains the living memories and life stories of over forty elderly Cypriots who were born and lived in Cyprus during the first half of the 20th Century. Costas had spent seven years interviewing and documenting the living memories of elderly Cypriots from the Cypriot diaspora in Australia and other parts of the world. The book, written in English is therefore a recollection of a way of life that has all but disappeared.

• 2014 – TAE40110 Certificate IV in Training and Assessment (NMIT – Melbourne)
• 2010 – Diploma of Vocational Education and Training (Vet) Practice (NMIT)
• 2006 – Graduate Diploma of Education: Applied Learning (Deakin Uni – Melbourne)
• 1995 – Bachelor of Arts in Education – Tertiary Education (Curtin Uni – Perth)
• 1982 – Diploma of Arts / Graphic Design (Phillip Insitute – Melbourne)

News & Media

Constantinos Emmanuelle and his Tales of Cyprus, The Greek Herald, 15 August 2023

To view more of Costa’s work please visit www.talesofcyprus.com.