Biography

My journey into anthropology began during my studies in Intercultural Communication (BA, 2007) and Anthropology (MA, 2009) at the University of Torino (Italy), where I first discovered a deep fascination for travelling and for ways of living far from my own. Food, clothing, rituals, and embodied practices started to exert a powerful magnetism on me. After a year in France—working and studying as an Italian language teacher for children in a primary school and a kindergarten—I travelled to Jharkhand (India) with Yatra Onlus to document the industrial expropriation of Adivasi agricultural lands. That experience opened a path of curiosity, commitment, and movement that has guided me ever since, inspiring many journeys driven by the desire to learn from and stand beside other compelling forms of humanity.

After completing the university studies, I began what I like to call my militant approach to anthropology. My first field of engagement was Switzerland, where I worked at Agridea (2010-2012) supporting the visibility of local farmers, advocating for the rights of women and children, and contributing to suicide-prevention initiatives. Those early years taught me that anthropology is not only a discipline - it was standing beside people.

Back in Italy, I earned a post-master's degree in Migration and Psychopathology at the University of Sacro Cuore in Rome, developing research on the meanings associated with death and loss during migratory experiences. In 2014, I published my first monograph, I volti celati di Civitavecchia. Un'antropologa sulle tracce del Venerdì Santo, an ethnographic exploration of the trance experienced by penitents during Holy Friday.Somewhere between fieldwork, manuscripts, and raising two children, I won the grant that allowed me to begin my doctoral research on body suspensions - one of the most transformative experiences of my life.

I completed my PhD in Medical Anthropology at the Institute of Social Sciences, University of Lisbon (2022), funded the Fundação para a Ciência e a Tecnologia. My work focused on European suspensions as non-therapeutic body modifications, using co-participated and experimental qualitative methodologies. The resulting multi-sited ethnography - conducted inNorway, Portugal, Italy, and online communities - later became the monograph, Beyond Pain. The Anthropology of Body Suspensions (2024, Berghahn Books).

As a member of the project Excel-The Pursuit of Excellence, I developed several public-oriented initiatives, including the workshop series The Hacked Barbie, and I served on the organizing committee of the art exhibition Be F**King Perfect (Lisbon, 15 September - 16 October 2022), curated by Chiara Pussetti. 

When I began my postdoctoral fellowship at the University of Turin in 2023, I was living in Rome and spent long hours travelling back and forth between the two cities. What could have been an exhausting routine unexpectedly became one of the most enriching periods of my life—thanks to Raffaella, my scientific supervisor. She welcomed me into her sociological world with generosity, curiosity, and a genuine desire to build knowledge together. We discovered the joy of multidisciplinary work and the comfort of a precious friendship that grew while exploring stigma surrounding vulvar pain conditions and experiment with multisensory approaches for both data collection and the public restitution of scientific knowledge beyond academic boundaries. In February 2024, we transformed the results of my research The Cloth of Pain into the artistic-scientific exhibition Vulvar Pain. Art. Science. Resistance, funded by the Department of Culture, Politics and Society as a public-engagement initiative. The inauguration at the Luigi Einaudi Campus attracted significant public interest, and the exhibition has since begun to travel, expanding its reach in the Piedmont region and involving hospitals, health centers and art galleries.

Through Raffaella, I met Micol Pizzolati, who supported me in shaping and writing the Vulvodynia as A Silent Pain (VuvASP) project—my first experience as Principal Investigator—which started in October 2025 at the University of Bergamo. VULVASP is not only a scientific endeavour; it is a responsibility that I feel deeply. I coordinate two research units (University of Torino and Policlinico San Matteo in Pavia), working on a health-access issue that affects one in seven women. I carry this project with the hope that our work will contribute to prevention, awareness, and the dismantling of the idea that vulvar pain is “normal.”

But perhaps the most meaningful part of this journey is what it represents for my children: the possibility of witnessing that one’s work can align with one’s passion—and that contributing, in even a small way, to the well-being of others is a purpose worth pursuing.