Dorette Panagiotopoulou completed her undergraduate and postgraduate studies in Architecture (BA Hons, MArch) at the Architectural Association (AA) School of Architecture in London. She obtained a Master’s degree (MA) in Cultural, Intellectual, and Visual History from the Warburg Institute (University of London), where she focused on the study of the iconological methods of Aby Warburg (Mnemosyne Atlas) and completed her dissertation titled Giovanni Battista Piranesi’s Campo Marzio: From Memory to Invention. She holds a PhD from the Architectural Association, where she taught in the History and Theory Studies department from 2017 to 2022.

Her research focuses on the concept of sacred space as a bearer of identity for each site under study, highlighting historical heritage and architecture as a medium for inscription, storage, and critical restoration of cultural memory and history. She has worked as a researcher and architect in Athens and London, including at Hopkins Architects, and has been involved in research and architectural projects related to the design and regeneration of public spaces in both urban and natural landscapes.

Her diploma thesis at the Architectural Association (AA) focused on the politics of sacred space, addressing the concept of critical restoration within the archaeological site of the Athenian Acropolis. Her doctoral research builds on her diploma thesis, expanding the study of architectural space in Ancient Greece, focusing on the archaeological site of Delphi. It investigates how the Delphic sanctuary serves as a significant field for analysing the tension between speech, inscription, and space. Through an interdisciplinary lens, the thesis develops a complex approach that examines the sanctuary of Delphi as a space of inscription for memory and history – a kind of hard-drive of antiquity.

In 2020, she received the Michael Ventris Award for Architecture for her short film Delphi Revisited, which she presented at the Institute of Classical Studies (ICS) in London in 2022.