When he was denied the opportunity to pursue his education further than what he had attained in the elementary school in Veroia, Greece, Demetrios left the country and came alone to the United States in 1911. His talent for drawing was noticed by John Hybers, an illustrator and painter in Boston, who arranged for a scholarship to the Boston Museum school for Demetrios under the patronage of Charlotte Hallowell. In the same year, the young artist was apprenticed to the sculptor, Charles Grafly, at his studio in Folly Cove on Cape Ann; thus began Demetrios's life-long association with this artists's colony near Gloucester, Massachusetts.
From 1913 to 1918 Demetrios studied under Grafly at the Pennsylvania Academy of the Fine Arts in Philadelphia. He then went to Europe on a Cresson Fellowship, awarded by the Pennsylvania Academy, and continued his studies in Paris at the Sorbonne and at the Ecole des Beaux-Arts until 1922. After his return to the United States, he taught for a time at the Boston Museum school and then, in 1930, opened the George Demetrios School of Drawing and Sculpture in Boston. After Grafly's death in 1929, Demetrios used his Folly Cove studio to offer summer classes. He followed Grafly's teaching methods, modified and elaborated upon them, and soon became known as an excellent teacher himself. Walker Hancock has written that teaching was Demetrios's greatest talent.
After his marriage to one of his students, Virginia Lee Burton, in 1931, Demetrios settled permanently in Folly Cove. The sculptor was known for his portrait heads and for his small ideal and allegorical figures. He even experimented with editorial comment in sculpture with works such as Lipstick Mania, 1940s, and Christ in the Subway, mid-1950s (both, Demetrios Estate). Among his few large, commissioned works is the Moses, a larger-than-life size relief done for the Congregation B'Nai Jehudah Synagogue in Kansas City, Missouri.
Demetrios showed consistently in Academy annual exhibitions from 1930 to 1975, and received from the Academy the Thomas R. Procter Prize, 1950 and 1975; the Greer Prize, 1955; and the Watrous Gold Medal, 1964.
