I am a mathematician, theatre director, playwright, educator, and philosopher of education. My work explores a single question: How do human communities learn to think together?
This question has led me through what might seem like disparate fields, such as mathematics, theatre, history and philosophy of science and technology, cognitive science, education, and democratic theory, but I have come to believe they are expressions of a single phenomenon. The same structure that makes a mathematical proof convincing makes a democratic assembly function, makes a theatrical performance transformative and educational, and makes a scientific community self-correcting. It is the structure of a special kind of dialectics: a claim, a challenge, and a witnessing community that adjudicates and decides.
Education
I hold a Ph.D. in Teaching and Learning, with a focus on STEM Education, from the University of Miami. My dissertation examined how Epic Theatre can deepen students’ understanding of artificial intelligence (AI) and its societal implications.
Now, I am developing what that research introduced into a framework I call Recursive Adjudicative Dialectics (RAD), a framework for structuring learning environments around the same democratic practice that underlies deliberation and scientific criticism: a proposer, an opposer, and an adjudicating community. Claims must be defended with rational arguments and challenged with rational counterarguments. The judgment can become a decision, a rule, or a provisional closure for action. And this process is recursive: Participation changes the people who take part in it, and those people, in turn, change the system itself.
I also hold a Master’s degree in the History and Philosophy of Science and Technology from the National and Kapodistrian University of Athens, where I graduated as valedictorian, and a Bachelor’s degree in Mathematics from the University of Patras, with a specialization in Mathematics Education, History, and Philosophy of Mathematics.
Mathematics
I have taught mathematics at the high school level and tutored and mentored students in Athens, Miami, and New York. As Head of the Mathematics Department at Archimedean Middle Conservatory, I led curriculum initiatives that improved mathematics proficiency rates from 68-78% to 83-96% during pandemic recovery.
I currently tutor high school and college mathematics and offer individualized mathematical enrichment in the history, philosophy, and applications of mathematics.
During the summer of 2025, I served as site director for the Summer Science Program International, a residential STEM program for gifted high school students.
I develop summer and after-school programs in college-level mathematics, including set theory, multivariable calculus, and game theory, that treat mathematics as philosophy, examine it within its historical and social contexts, explore paradoxes and unsolved problems, and examine the deep connections between mathematical proof and dialectics.
Applied Learning Sciences
I am an adjunct professor in the Applied Learning Sciences Ed.D. online program at the University of Miami, where I teach Introduction to the Learning Sciences, Human Learning, Assessment of Human and Organizational Learning, Design of Formal Learning Environments, and Introduction to Qualitative Methods.
For the Applied Learning Sciences Ed.D. online program, I have developed what I call AI-Dialectic. This is a seven-step pedagogical protocol, in which doctoral students interact with a large language model (LLM) as a dialectical partner, critically evaluating AI-generated responses against course readings and empirical research to strengthen theoretical reasoning and identify AI limitations. I have implemented AI-Dialectic in the courses I have taught since Fall 2025.
Philosophy
My theoretical work focuses on the thesis that human consciousness, knowledge, and civilizations evolve through social selection. A process analogous to natural selection, in which ideas compete within dialectical arenas and survive or die based on their capacity to withstand challenge before a witnessing community.
I am writing a book, On the Origin of Ideas by Means of Social Selection, that traces this process through several poleis across three millennia: From Athens and Alexandria to Baghdad, Florence, Vienna, New York, and Silicon Valley, examining how Recursive Adjudicative Dialectics emerged, flourished, or failed in different cultural contexts. The book concludes with a call for a metacognitive enlightenment with dialectical education at its core. The classroom is a crucible where students rotate through all roles of proposer, critic, and member of the witnessing and deciding community. It’s in this learning environment where the next generation learns to keep the fire of collective consciousness burning.
My blog, The Astoria Agora, extends these ideas into contemporary discussions of education, artificial intelligence, theatre, democracy, and the city around me. Named for the ancient Greek marketplace where citizens gathered to exchange produce, art, and ideas, to discuss, debate, and decide: the Agora. The Astoria Agora is my digital forum for exploring what it would mean to build a modern polis education. An education in constant dialogue with democratic citizenship.
Walking Astoria is an ongoing series within The Astoria Agora blog. During my morning walks through Astoria Park, I take pictures, notice the streets, bridges, signs, and people, and record my observations and thoughts, wherever they lead: history, philosophy, science, theatre, mathematics, and democracy, all leading toward the book I am trying to write.
Theatre
I trained in theatre direction at the Experimental Stage of the National Theatre of Greece and in acting at the Contemporary Theatre of Athens Drama School. My teaching, directing, and acting credits include the Ancient Theatre of Epidaurus, the Odeon of Herodes Atticus, the National Theatre of Greece, and the Patras Regional and Municipal Theatre, as well as alternative spaces in Athens and major cities throughout Greece, Miami, and New York.
I have directed works by Aristophanes, Samuel Beckett, Bertolt Brecht, George Orwell, Roberto Athayde, A.R. Gurney Jr., and contemporary Greek playwrights, including Makis Papadimitratos, Vangelis Alexandris, Elia Verganelaki, and Christos Strepkos. I served as assistant director and acting coach on feature-length films that received awards at the Thessaloniki International Film Festival, including the FIPRESCI Award from the International Federation of Film Critics.
I taught theatre and mathematics at Archimedean Upper Conservatory for nine years, directing plays that integrated theatre with STEM concepts, including research collaborations with the University of Miami on using theatre to teach the Nature of Science and the social implications of AI.
I am currently working on my play Magma, a sci-fi existential comedy that traps a human and a humanoid AI in an elevator, where small talk spirals into parasites, memes, free will, the boundaries between organic and artificial, and consciousness. The play breaks the fourth wall in its final movement, implicating the audience in the very process of meaning-making it describes. Magma had its first staged reading on January 17, 2026, at the Harvey Fierstein Theatre Lab (New York Public Library for the Performing Arts), and its second staged reading on June 6, 2026, at the Astoria Playhouse at the Greek Cultural Center. A feature-length screenplay, Pending, develops these themes as an anthology for the big screen.
Comics
I worked professionally as a comics artist and illustrator from 1994 to 2010. Two comics series were published in 9, the supplement comics magazine in the Saturday edition of Eleftherotypia, a major Greek daily: Dog Tales, stories about the ancient Cynic philosopher Diogenes of Sinope, and “Apeiron” Hotel, inspired by the paradoxes of infinity in mathematics, science, and philosophy.
I represented Greece in the comics category at the 9th Biennial of Young Artists from Europe and the Mediterranean in Rome, and my work has appeared in twenty-six solo and group exhibitions across Greece, Italy, Serbia, and the Republic of North Macedonia. I continue to design posters and programs for theatrical productions.
The Thread
A mathematical proof is a demonstration: a dialectic between the mathematician demonstrating, an imagined skeptic, and the community of mathematicians. A democratic assembly is a dialectic between citizens within a democratic community. A scientific paper is a dialectic within the scientific community. A theatrical performance is a dialectic between competing perspectives on stage and the audience. Meaning emerges within the community. In the network of social interactions. Not in individual brains. Meaning emerges from the encounter and tension between perspectives. From the structure of claim, challenge, and collective judgment. And the judgment changes the community that will make the next judgment.
The Athenians institutionalized this process democratically. They called the community in which it happened the polis. A polis is not just a city. It is a community that has learned to metabolize contradiction. That is practicing direct democracy. Civilizations that can metabolize contradiction survive. Civilizations that cannot, break.
This is what I work on. Education that focuses on democratic citizenship, philosophy that traces how human communities learned to think together, theatre that questions.
Thinking that continues the human dialectic through the ages.
The fire must be tended.