Soula Mantalvanos
Artist, designer and gallerist. Advocate for better quality of care and founder of My Health Story.
Soula Mantalvanos blends design and art with her Byzantine heritage, using paintings and etchings to tell personal stories. Regular sketching sits at the core of her artistic practice.
Beginning her professional career as creative director of her design company, ooi.com.au, Soula is currently represented at Queenscliff Gallery and has also previously exhibited at The Convent Daylesford, Port Jackson Press, Gasworks Arts Park, and Brunswick Street Gallery. Soula has also been a finalist in several Australian art prizes.
For Soula, artistic practice serves as a means of self-expression, while design offers a disciplined avenue for creative exploration. Drawing on both disciplines and keen observation, Soula explores a topic that has always fascinated her: identity—whether it appears in architecture, human subjects, or objects.
Soula consistently engages with identity, portraying figures with empathy rather than egocentrism and balancing sincerity with confidence. In her work, a seated model or marionette often sits before Soula, surrounded by historical architecture and significant objects from her life, such as olive leaves, suitcases, and her patron saint, St. George.
In Soula’s most recent exhibition, Corridoi Luminosi | Luminous Corridors, the artist traced a personal journey through Central and Northern Italian towns and laneways—places rich with stone, shadow, light, and daily life. Sketched in situ and completed in her Queenscliff studio, the oil paintings reflected the quiet act of walking, observing, and returning.
‘Each painting captures not only what I saw, but what lingered—light falling on stone, the echo of footsteps, a remembered melody, and the simple pleasure of being there.’
In 2015, a sea change from Melbourne led Soula and her husband, Theo, to Co-Direct Queenscliff Gallery (QG) on the Bellarine Peninsula, where she applied her fine art and design experience to curate exhibitions with represented artists and manage QG’s brand and media.
Soula is also a 2026 Melbourne Design Week finalist for her system and App, My Health Story.
