Kanakakis was born in 1945 in Piraeus and died in 1997 in Athens. She Studied engraving at The Academy of Fine Art, Athens (1965-9) and later she continued her studies at The Croydon College of Art (1973-5). After spending a few years studying, living and working in the United Kingdom, she returned and settled in Athens, in 1989 and taught drawing at The Vakalo School. Kanakaki started off in the sphere of critical realism, interspersing reality with surrealistic figures and associations in a bid to find the poetry behind appearances. Her paintings gradually became more abstract, the colours more violent, and the limits of the canvas were frequently exceeded with assemblages of a variety of surfaces. Kanakakis exhibited her work in more than ten solo exhibitions, in Athens, Paris, London, and elsewhere, some of them open air, such as the Argos Festival in 1996 and Tourkovounia in 1997. Additionally she participated in a number of group exhibitions, such as The Panhellenics in 1975 and The Paris Biennale in 1980.