Kiki Gounaridou teaches theater history and dramatic literature. She taught theater and performance studies at the University of Pittsburgh in the doctoral program in theater. Gounaridou was the director of Smith College's Junior Year Abroad program in Geneva for 2005–06, 2008–09, and 2009–10. She was also a teaching fellow at Doshisha University in Kyoto, Japan, during the spring of 2011.

Gounaridou has published and presented—in national and international conferences—numerous papers on ancient Greek theater, French theater, theater translation, theater theory and contemporary theater, among others. Her translation of Euripides's Hecuba was published in 1995, and she was the guest editor of the special issue on theater translation of the journal Metamorphoses (2001). She is also the author of Euripides and Alcestis: Speculations, Simulations, and Stories of Love in the Athenian Culture (University Press of America, 1998), Madame La Mort and Other Plays By Rachilde (Johns Hopkins University Press, 1998), Staging Nationalism: Essays on Theatre and National Identity (Mcfarland Publishers, 2005), and Two Plays by Denis Diderot: The Illegitimate Son and the Father of the Family (Peter Lang, 2011).

Her current scholarly projects include the translation of five Swiss-French plays, that deal with social, cultural, and political issues in modern Switzerland. She has already translated and published two of the plays, Sbrissa's Crossing the Desert and Ziegler's Private Affairs in the translation journal Metamorphoses (2015 and 2017).

Gounaridou is a member of the executive board of the Comparative Drama Conference and former editor of the book series Text & Presentation (McFarland Publishers, 2009, 2010 and 2011). She has also been active as a theater director, both in Europe and the United States, for more than 25 years.