Born in Greece, Eleni Mylonas came to New York on a Fulbright grant and a scholarship from Columbia University. She received a Master’s Degree in Journalism in 1967 and made New York her home. She later studied photography at the Polytechnic of Central London and was invited to show her work at the Royal Photographic Society. After traveling extensively in Europe, and North Africa she drove overland from London to Afghanistan and back in1972. Returning to New York she completed a haunting series of large-scale photographs Journey Through Ellis Island which was exhibited at PS1 in New York and at the Zoumboulakis Gallery in Athens. Three large-scale prints from this series are now part of the permanent installation at the Ellis Island Museum. Represented for many years by the Ileana Tounta Gallery in Athens and Art Resources Transfer in New York, Mylonas soon moved from pure photography to sculpture, to geometric abstraction, to video and mixed media. Her work has been widely exhibited in Europe and the United States and is in many public and private collections. She has taught at Parson’s school for Design, The New School in New York and given many talks on her work. She was part of Modern Odysseys a major review of Greek American Art at the Queens Museum of Art in New York and participated in the first Athens Biennale Destroy Athens. Her video installation Virtual Conversations was shown at the Macedonian Museum of Contemporary Art, during the 3rd Biennale of Thessaloniki in 2011.  In 2014 she had a multimedia solo show at the Benaki Museum in Athens. The show later travelled to the Gallery Francoise Heitch in Munich.

Mylonas maintains a studio in New York and continues to travel frequently.