Elli Seraidari was born in Aidini (now Aydın), near Smyrna (now İzmir), Asia Minor. She went on to study photography in Germany under Hugo Erfurth and Franz Fiedler, in 1920-1921, before the 1922 expulsion of the ethnic Greeks of Asia Minor by the Turks following the Greco-Turkish war (1919–1922). In 1924, she went to Greece, where she adopted a naive nationalistic and conservative approach to her work. Her style coincided with the Greek state's need to produce an ideal view of the country and its people, for internal as well as external (tourism) purposes. In this respect Souyioultzoglou-Seraidari can be seen as the first Greek "national" advertiser, especially after her appointment as official photographer of the newly established Greek Ministry of Tourism. At some point she was referred to as "the Greek Leni Riefenstahl" because of her collaboration with the 4th of August Regime (1936–1941), of which she was one of its most prolific photographers.[ citation needed ] In 1936, she photographed the Berlin Olympic Games.[ citation needed ] In 1939, she was commissioned with the decoration of the interior of the Greek pavilion at the New York's World Fair, which she did with gigantic collages expressing in an extremely selective manner the physical similarities between ancient and modern Greeks. As a Greek of the Diaspora, Nelly's view of Greece was nothing less than "idyllic", which matched the propaganda aims of the proto-fascist regime, led by General Ioannis Metaxas. Infact, her work helped illustrate the ideologies of the racial continuity of the Greeks since Antiquity, which was at the core of Metaxas' agenda (the so-called "Third Hellenic Civilization". Whilst in New York for the World's Fair in 1939, she decided not to return to Greece. In the United States she continued her commercial photographic portraiture and developed further in advertising photography as well as photo-reportages. She also maintained links with powerful Greeks including shipowners Stavros Niarchos and Aristotle Onassis and developed contacts with the White House. From this period little is known of her work, except from her project "New York Easter Parade" which in retrospective views of her work goes largely unmentioned, as it fails to align with either any previous Greek stereotype or with the continuous developments in the photographic language of her contemporaries. Eĺli was a Photographer who believed in free will, movement and freedom and used her artistic eye, choreographic and photographic skills and talent to depict this belief. She travelled extensively. She finally returned to Greece on 2 March 1966 and lived, together with her husband Angelos Seraidaris, at Nea Smyrni, Attica, and gave up photography. In 1985, Nelly's donated her photo archives and cameras to the Benaki Museum in Athens, while in 1987 she was presented with an honorary diploma and medal by the Hellenic Centre of Photography and the government. In 1993, she was awarded the Order of the Phoenix by the president of the Greek Republic. In 1996, the Athens Academy presented her with its Arts and Letters Award. Nelly's died in Nea Smyrni, Athens in 1998.
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