Eleni Bastéa was born and grew up in Thessaloniki, Greece. She took her undergraduate degree in art history from Bryn Mawr College, and a Master’s of Architecture and a Ph.D. in history of architecture from the University of California at Berkeley. She was the recipient of several grants and awards, including the Graham Foundation Grant and the ACSA New Faculty Teaching Award. She was Regents’ Professor of Architecture at School of Architecture & Planning and Director of the International Studies Institute at The University of New Mexico.

Bastéa is the author of The Creation of Modern Athens: Planning the Myth (Cambridge University Press, 2000), co-winner of the John D. Criticos Prize, and a finalist for the Sir Steven Runciman Award. The book was also published in Greek (author’s translation): Αthens 1834-1896: Neoclassical City planning and Greek National (Libro, 2008). She is also the editor and a contributing author of the anthology Memory and Architecture (University of New Mexico Press, 2004). She had lectured at several universities in the US and Europe.

Bastéa was a teacher of general courses on the history of architecture, as well as seminars on 19th and 20th century architecture and urbanism, memory and architecture, and contemporary indigenous architecture (co-taught with Professor Ted Jojola). Her course, “Greece and Turkey, 1922-Present: From Conflict to Rapprochement,” offered through the history department, received support from the European Union Center of Excellence (2010). She was a member of the team of the British art magazine .Cent as creative associate and architecture editor. Her short story “The High Heels” (2005), written in Greek, won the Navarino Foundation Prize, and is included in a Modern Greek Reader at Dartmouth College.

Note: Eleni Bastéa passed away on January 12, 2020.