Federica Manfredi

Cultural and Medical Anthropologist

Researcher at the University of Bergamo

Principal Investigator VulvASP - Vulvodynia as A Silent Pain

Project Manager V-DAYS Vulvar Dialogues About Youth and Sexuality

Creative and Scientific curator of the traveling exhibition Vulvar Pain. Art.Science. Resistance

Federica Manfredi is a cultural and medical anthropologist based in Roma (Italy). Her research interests include the body, pain, altered state of consciousness, body modifications, biomedical power and inequalities, gendered medicine, sexuality, social performances, and extreme behaviours.

Since 2023, she has been a postdoctoral research fellow at the University of Torino, and she served as teaching assistant in courses on medical anthropology and on the sociology of gender and sexuality. Awarded the Cariplo Fundation grant for Young Researcher 2024, Federica is developing a three-year project as Principal Investigator (2025-2028) dedicated to exploring diagnostic delay in vulvodynia care pathways. 

Methodologically, she experiments with qualitative creative methods and participatory approaches to challenge the limits of logocentric logics and epistemic hierarchies within ethnographic encounters. At the University of Bergamo, she is member of the Creative Methods Open Lab. Federica is committed to scientific dissemination beyond academic contexts through multisensory tools and public engagement initiatives as forms of applied anthropology. 

In this framework, she worked on the curatorship of The Hacked Barbie workshop series, part of the project Excel-The Pursuit of Excellence at the University of Lisbon (2017-2022). In Italy, she is the creative and scientific curator of Vulvar Pain. Art. Science. Resistance, a travelling exhibition aimed at raising awareness on access to vulvar health. She was also project manager of Vulvar Dialogues About Youth and Sexuality project (University of Torino 2024-2025), which involved seminars with high school students and adults to collectively transform taboos surrounding vulvar and pelvic suffering.

She works as scientific coach, educator and behavioural analyst in Denmark and Italy.  Since 2024, she has been a member of the Women’s Health Observatory of the Municipality of Torino, and she collaborates with theInstitute of Anthropology of the Pontifical Gregorian University in Rome. She is also part of the International Advisory Network of the Institute of Arts and Cultural Studies at the Latvian Academy of Culture (from January 2025).

Finally, she is co-funder of the Pain International Network  with Kate Clancy (University of Illinois). The network brings together scholars and students interested in an informal peer-education programe focused on pain, health, discrimination, and body. If you would like to join the  network, please feel free to contact her.