Karine Leno Ancellin was born in New York city to a French father and American mother and currently lives in Athens where she is a professor, a freelance writer and translator.  She studied in Paris and obtained two DEAs, (diploma of Superior Studies) one in Anthropology at the Universite Paris VII, Jussieu; and the other one in Literature at the Institut Charles V.  She worked as a researcher for the CEDPED (centre Population et Development) with Francis Gendreau before she turned to journalism in Sahelian Africa for a few years, mostly interested in social and women’s issues. In Brussels where she spent ten years prior to Athens she has worked on literature by women of ethnic background, and explored hybridity in Muslim women characters in English language fiction between 2001 and 2008 for her PhD at the Vrije Universiteit of Brussels. Her work was presented at the ACLA seminar at Havard University, York University (Canada) Leicester, Lincoln (UK) Ibn Zohr university (Morocco) amongst others. She has devoted parts of her research to analyzing representations of the self and the wearing of the hijab in recent literature.

Karine Leno Ancellin is now involved in poetry in Athens Greece, where, in association with Angela Lyras, she created A Poets’ Agora, a bilingual Poetry society.