Irini Gonou was born in 1955 in Athens. She studied sculpture at the Ecole Nationale Superieure des Beaux-Arts and then at the Ecole Nationale Superieure des Arts Decoratifs, where she has also worked as a workshop assistant for two years at the section of ceramic sculpture. She lived in Paris for eleven years studying at the same time the multicultural dimension of art. From 1980 she has shown her work in thirty solo exhibitions in Greece and abroad.

Lahd Gallery exhibition Irini Gonou: A Tale of Two Cultures was a unique art quest which seeks to address and explore the healing and protective power of the written word as a specific cultural idiom and takes the form of a dialogue between the Greek and Arabic cultures. The two cultures, Greek and Arabic, with their distinctive indigenous scripts, are seen in dialogue with a continuous and life-affirming exchange and crossfertilisation of influences.