His hybrid creations gained a growing dedicated audience in Greece, and in 2004 he became the youngest artist to have been assigned to direct the biggest show on earth: the Olympic Games Opening Ceremonies.
At 19, he earned himself a place at the Athens School of Fine Arts, entering the institution with the highest marks attained by any student, and there studying under Dimitris Mytaras and Rena Papaspyrou.
He presented his art work at a number of exhibitions, produced illustrations for numerous magazines, and designed and co-edited the countercultural fanzine Kontrosol sto Haos (1986–1992),[2] one of the few publications to include openly gay content at that time in Greece.
In 1986, Papaioannou took a trip to New York City where he was introduced to the Erick Hawkins Technique at the dancer and choreographer's studio, and where he attended seminars on Butoh given by Maureen Fleming at La MaMa E.T.C.
The group's four early works – The Mountain–The Raincoat in 1987, and Room I–Room II in 1988 – represented Greece at the 3rd and 4th Biennials of Young Artists from Europe and the Mediterranean, held in Barcelona and Bologna respectively, and were warmly received by the press – Stefano Casi of the Italian L'Unità described the company as "the revelation of the Festival" in 1988.
[6] In 1989, Papaioannou left Greece for Germany to work as an unpaid trainee assistant to Robert Wilson in Hamburg as he prepared The Black Rider: The Casting of the Magic Bullets with Tom Waits and William S. Burroughs.
Papaioannou, once back in Athens, created The Last Song of Richard Strauss in collaboration with the visual artist Nikos Alexiou in 1990, the first in a series of critical successes for the Edafos Dance Theatre company.
Moons followed in 1992, a two-part work that drew upon the poetry of Sappho and the ballet Le Spectre de la Rose, but it was 1993's Medea that was to prove the company's greatest success.
This dance-theatre retelling of the Medea myth was performed 52 times by the year 2000, touring festivals and venues across Europe and the Mediterranean region, visiting New York City, and representing Greece at the Lisbon Expo '98.
In her review of the 1998 performance of Medea at the 12th Lyon Dance Biennial, Anna Kisselgoff of The New York Times describes the production as "the festival's big surprise", praising its "extraordinary passion" and "striking intensity".
Other major Edafos Dance Theatre works include: 1995's A Moment's Silence, the first Greek stage work to deal directly with the issue of AIDS (a topic Papaioannou also tackled in his 1987 comic The Red Freckles on Your Skin), presented the world première of The Songs of Sin, a cycle of songs written by the Oscar-winning composer Manos Hadjidakis, and of the specially commissioned Requiem for the End of Love by composer Yorgos Koumendakis.
[12] In 2005, following the success of the Athens 2004 Olympic Ceremonies, Papaioannou received the Golden Cross of the Order of Honour, awarded by the President of the Hellenic Republic for outstanding artistic achievement.
Inside this room, for twenty nights in the Spring of 2011, a simple series of movements documenting our daily return home was uniformly repeated by thirty performers in countless combinations and superimpositions.
And on the other, an interest in the form of the artwork itself — in how a single motif can become a kind of latent narrative through its repetition and multiplication (like on ancient Greek Geometric vases and Eastern patterned carpets).
Inside's final night was filmed in a single, six-hour take and first presented as a video installation as part of Ανταλλαγή / Austausch / Exchange, a 2012 Goethe-Institut art project curated by Sofia Dona, at the Broadway open-air cinema in Athens.
From the end of the 80s until now, during a rich career, Papaioannou has made a vast contribution, in Greece and the rest of the world, to contemporary theatre, visual art, dance and other forms of artistic expression.