Kiki Gounaridou received her PhD in Theatre History from the University of California, Davis. She taught Theatre and Performance Studies at the University of Pittsburgh in the doctoral program in Theatre. Gounaridou was the director of Smith College’s Junior Year Abroad program in Geneva for 2005–06, 2008–09, and 2009–10. She was also a teaching fellow at Doshisha University in Kyoto, Japan, during the spring of 2011. She is currently Professor of Theatre History at Smith College.

Gounaridou has published and presented—in national and international conferences—numerous papers on ancient Greek theatre, French theatre, theatre translation, theatre theory and contemporary theatre, among others. Her translation of Euripides’s Hecuba was published in 1995, and she was the guest editor of the special issue on theatre translation of the journal Metamorphoses (2001). She is also the author, translator, and editor of several books, including Euripides and Alcestis: Speculations, Simulations, and Stories of Love in the Athenian Culture (1998), Madame La Mort and Other Plays By Rachilde (1998), Staging Nationalism: Essays on Theatre and National Identity (2005), and Two Plays by Denis Diderot: The Illegitimate Son and the Father of the Family (2011).

Her current scholarly projects include the translation of four Swiss-French plays, dealing with social, cultural, and political issues in contemporary Switzerland. She has already translated and published two of the plays, Isabelle Sbrissa’s Crossing the Desert and Dominique Ziegler’s Private Affairs in the translation journal Metamorphoses (2015 and 2017).

Gounaridou is a member of the executive board of directors of the Comparative Drama Conference (CDC) and former editor of the CDC’s book series Text & Presentation (2009, 2010, and 2011). She has also been active as a theater director, both in Europe and the United States, for over 30 years.