Jasmine Clotilde Pisapia is an anthropologist and intermedial practitioner working at the intersection between environmental crisis, aesthetics, and critical theory. After completing her PhD in Sociocultural Anthropology from Columbia University in New York, she has been a SSHRC Postdoctoral Fellow in the  Department of Anthropology at McGill University and the Critical Media Lab in Montreal, as well as a Fellow at the Institute for Cultural Inquiry ICI Berlin. She is currently a Researcher and Marie Skłodowska-Curie Fellowship grantee at Ca’ Foscari University in Venice, where she teaches environmental and visual anthropology. Using methods drawing from cinema and the performing arts, her new project explores the relationship between environmental activist communities in the burning wastelands of the Neapolitan area, and the overlapping geological histories of fire near Mount Vesuvius volcano.

She has published essays on southern Italian anthropologist Ernesto De Martino’s studies of mourning, possession rituals, and the apocalypse in the 1950-60s. As an anthropologist, she has conducted extensive fieldwork on the toxic legacies of southern Italy’s post-WWII industrialization and on the current ecological crisis of Taranto—one of Europe’s most polluted cities due to the largest steel factory of the continent. This is the object of her book manuscript, Taken By Poison: Possession and Pollution in Italy’s Postindustrial South, an intermedial anthropology of toxicity.

Alongside her scholarly and ethnographic work, she has collaborated with the NYC-based independent theater companyNew York City Players (with Richard Maxwell andKatiana Gonçales Rangel).  She is currently working on a collaborative performance piece in Terzigno near Mount Vesuvius, in collaboration with Museo Emblema and Ex-Asilo Filangieri in Naples. She co-foundedcolletivo epidemia, a research collective and independent magazine invested in political ecology, art, and grassroots organizations mobilized around food and agroecological practices in Italy. Her work has appeared or is forthcoming in Cultural Anthropology, Visual Anthropology Review, Intermédialités/Intermediality,Visual Ethnography,INCITE: Journal of Experimental Media,SCAPEGOAT: Architecture | Landscape | Political Economy,Antropologia.