Salt Lake City has a long and rich history of Greek migration. Alexia Maikidou Poutrino, an MFA candidate in modern dance at the University of Utah, explored this local Greek history through her research. She utilized Screendance — a hybrid art form that merges dance and film — to create a film that brings new life to the Greek community’s archival materials.
Maikidou Poutrino’s research started in a class about Screendance, where she had a project that was focused on archives.
“As an international student, I found myself trying to discover where I belonged,” she said. “I was starting to get to know the Greek community here and thought, ‘This is a live archive.’”
Deciding to dig deeper into the community, Maikidou Poutrino visited significant physical spaces such as the Greek Orthodox Church, its attached museum, and Mount Olivet Cemetery. At the cemetery, she was struck by the number of Greek names she saw.
“I didn’t know there was such a large Greek community in Salt Lake City,” Maikidou Poutrino said. “I became interested in looking further into the city’s Greek history.”
Her Screendance project shares this history in a new light by bringing together dancing, oral histories, the museum’s archival materials, photographs from the personal archives of community members, and an exploration of the cemetery. The result is a film that recontextualizes Salt Lake City’s Greek history.
Because Greek migration stories are often told from a male viewpoint, she chose to add a new perspective by including the story of a female community member. She also added her dancing body to the existing archival narrative by taking traditional Greek dances that are often performed by men and reinterpreting them on film through her own movement.
“I wanted to share the history from a dance lens,” she said. “I decided to take these existing archives and then bring them into my body and see how I experienced them.”
Maikidou Poutrino’s work not only honors the past but also invites the viewer to reflect on migration, memory, and identity.
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