Federica Manfredi

Cultural and Medical Anthropologist

Post doctoral Fellow at the University of Torino

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) and interested in topics such as body, pain, altered state of consciousness, body modifications, biomedical powers and inequlities, gendered medicine, sexuality, gender performances and behaviours connected with the achievement of models of social perfection. 

From 2023 she is post doctoral fellow researcher at the University of Torino and she is teaching assistant in courses of medical anthropology and sociology of gender and sexuality. Awarded by the Cariplo Fundation grant for Young Researcher, Federica Manfredi is going to develop a 3 year project as PI (2025-2028) to explore the diagnostic delay in vulvodynia care paths.

Methodologically, she experiments with qualitative creative methods and participatory approaches to challenge limits of logo-centric logics and epistemic hierarpowers in the ethnographic interactions. She is interested in the scientific dissemination beyond academic contexts through multi-sensory tools and in actions of public engagement as experiences of applied anthropology. In this context, she worked in the curatorship of the workshop series The Hacked Barbie, an activity 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 to sensitize on vulvar health access. Today she is project manager of V-DAYS, involving seminars with high school students and adults to co-transform taboos stigmatizing vulvar and pelvic suffering.

She works as behavioural analysit in Denmark and Italy and as educator with health professionals. 

From 2024, she is member of the Women’s Health Observatory, Torino municipality, and she cooperate with the Università Pontificia Gregoriana in Rome.

She is member of the International Advisory Network of the Institute of Arts and Cultural Studies of the Latvian Academy of Culture (January 2025).

Co-funder of the Pain International Network  with prof. Kate Clancy, University of Illinois. The network gathers scholars and students interested in an informal peer-education self-programe about topics as pain, gender, health, discrimination and sexuality. To join the network, please contac me.