The visual artist, painter, and textile artist Kaiti Stavroudi (Καίτη Σταυρούδη) was born in 1933 in Port Said, Egypt, to Cretan parents. She spent her youth in Athens, and from 1962 until the end of her life in 2015, she lived and worked in Thessaloniki.
She began painting professionally in 1967, applying traditional designs onto woven fabrics. She studied traditional weaving, writing articles and delivering lectures on the subject. Concurrently, from 1968 onward, she engaged extensively with traditional costumes, focusing on their structural remodeling (cutting) and their painted decoration using designs inspired by old folk embroidery (“grafto”). In 1974, she took up tapestry, utilizing the needle-on-canvas technique (“skoulato”) based on her own original designs—a process that contributed significantly to the maturation of her work. In 1978, she acquired her first loom and began creating small-scale tapestries, searching for new techniques, alternative materials, and unique blends of wool and colors; she worked dynamically as a weaver, making numerous corrections and alterations along the way, guided by a sketch placed behind the warp threads. By the early 1980s, she was working on a vertical loom—often referred to as Penelope’s loom—producing much larger-scale tapestries. From 1989 until 2011, she turned completely to painting, devoting herself to acrylics and watercolors within the realm of abstract landscape painting.
She held numerous solo exhibitions both in Greece and abroad, and participated in many group exhibitions. In 2005, the Vafopouleio Cultural Center in Thessaloniki organized a retrospective exhibition of her work, while in 2019, the Telloglion Foundation of Arts AUTh organized the exhibition “Kaiti Stavroudi: Tapisseries”, showcasing her artworks from the foundation’s collection.