Ioannis Christidis has been involved with music since his early childhood. He plays the piano and the Middle-Eastern oud and he studied the traditional music of different regions of Greece during his course at the Music High-school of Thessaloníki. After completing a masters degree in Architecture (2010), he started on a second course in Music Sciences and Art (2017), with a focus on the oud and the music of Asia Minor. In 2019, Christidis enrolled on a doctoral course in ethnomusicology at mdw – University of Music and Performing Arts Vienna.
As of March 2020, Ioannis Christidis works as a research fellow at the Music and Minorities Research Center. The focus of his research project is the examination of the relationship between the music-making of Syrian forced migrants in Europe and the mainstream anti-migration discourses and policies within the EU context. Christidis was awarded the 2020 Dissertation Award for Research on Migration by the Austrian Academy of Sciences.
Throughout his training, Christidis' main concern has been the cross-fertilization of academic knowledge with various community-building and social-solidarity projects. Engaged ethnomusicology and a wider research perspective that seeks to contribute to the overcoming of structural injustices related to the refugee experience constitute central principles in his current Ph.D. project.