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Since 2024 she has served as Deputy Director of the Department of the Arts and as Coordinator of the Third Mission – Public Engagement Committee. She is President of the 2024/2025 National Scientific Qualification (ASN) Committee for the field SPS/08. She is a member of the Scientific Board of CRICC, the Centre for Interaction with Cultural and Creative Industries at the University of Bologna. She is also the Scientific Coordinator of the PIC Section – Cultural Processes and Institutions of the Italian Sociological Association (AIS). Furthermore, she sits on the Advisory Board of the Culture Committee of the Fondazione del Monte di Bologna e Ravenna, and she is President of the SIAE Commission Per Chi Crea.

She has been involved in numerous competitive European projects, and currently serves as scientific coordinator for several initiatives, including the PRIN 2022 PNRR project EASI “SEED Social Ecosystem Development” (2021–2024), and as Principal Investigator of the PRIN 2022 PNRR project “Cultural Welfare Ecosystems for Wellbeing: Mapping Semantics and Practices, Co-designing Tools and Raising Awareness.”

She teaches Theatre and Performance, Theory and Practices of the Contemporary Imaginary, and Sociology of Tourism. Her research focuses on communication phenomena examined through the analytical lens of performance.

She conducts research on processes of participation and civic imagination; cultural participation and audience engagement; and the role of culture and artistic practices in producing social change, with particular attention to the relationship between practices and imaginaries. She holds a PhD in Sociology. She has been a research fellow at the Department of the Arts and at the Department of Sociology and Business Law at the University of Bologna, working within several European projects. She has long collaborated with the Centre for Advanced Studies on Consumption and Communication (University of Bologna). She also collaborates, both scientifically and methodologically, with the Fondazione per l’Innovazione Urbana. For many years she has designed and facilitated action-research processes for public institutions and civil-society organisations.

Lorenzo Giannini is Associate Professor of Cultural and Communication Processes in the Department of Communication Studies, Humanities and International Studies (DISCUI) at the University of Urbino Carlo Bo, where he teaches Sociology of Consumption and Socialisation and Cultural Processes. His research adopts a predominantly qualitative approach. Within consumption studies, his work focuses on practices, particularly sustainable consumption practices. In the broader sociocultural domain, his main interests concern processes of participation and social inclusion. His publications include: “You’re Just Playing the Victim”: Online Grieving and the Non-use of Social Media in Italy, Social Media + Society, 8(4), with F. Pasquali and R. Bartoletti (2022); “Siamo tutti volontari”. Etnografia di una Festa de l’Unità, tra retoriche e pratiche, FrancoAngeli, Milan (2020).

Her work addresses cultures and practices of participation; co-design methodologies in public policy and cultural welfare; urban commons and collaborative governance. Long engaged in civic participation processes at the local level, she has taken part in interdisciplinary research projects at the intersection of climate-change impacts, civic engagement, and social and environmental justice. In recent years, she has oriented part of her academic interests toward gender and feminist perspectives in studies of public space and the representation of women’s and gender minorities’ citizenship, with a specific focus on data feminism and public policy developed through participatory and creative methodologies.

She is a research fellow at the Department of Communication Studies, Humanities and International Studies (DISCUI) at the University of Urbino Carlo Bo. Her main research areas concern the study of the performing arts, with particular attention to audiences, audience development, and liveness. She curates audience-relations activities for L’arboreto Teatro Dimora and coordinates SguarDimora, the theatre’s blog dedicated to documenting the creative processes of resident artists. She has published: Il dispositivo teatrale alla prova del Covid-19. Mediatizzazione, liveness e pubblici (with L. Gemini, S. Brilli 2020); Viaggi teatrali: migrazione e turismo nel teatro contemporaneo (with L. Gemini 2020); Il pubblico dello spettacolo dal vivo nelle Marche (with L. Gemini, S. Brilli 2022); Theatre without theatres: Investigating access barriers to mediatized theatre and digital liveness during the COVID-19 pandemic (with S. Brilli, L. Gemini 2023); The reinvention of theatre space during Covid-19. Analysis of the Italian Case (with L. Gemini, S. Brilli, G. Boccia Artieri 2023); Sperimentazioni teatrali nell’ambiente virtuale: le creazioni digitali di Giacomo Lilliù / Collettivo Ønar (2023).

A critic and art historian, his work focuses on social practices, activism, performance, radical pedagogy, urban studies, and participation. He has published in peer-reviewed journals such as Comunicazioni Sociali, Piano B, Tracce Urbane, Connessioni Remote, and Field. In 2016 he founded the collective Autopalo, through which he investigates modes of participation by engaging with football culture and organised fandom. Autopalo’s work has been exhibited in national and international venues (Palais de Tokyo, Paris; Museo della Fotografia Contemporanea, Milan). In 2021 his doctoral dissertation on Italian artistic practices in urban space and the history of early socially engaged art projects in the United States was published by Mimesis. He has taught as an adjunct lecturer at the University of Bologna and at Iuav University of Venice, where he also held a research fellowship conducting a study on culture-led urban regeneration. His book Come leggere il monumento o la sua rimozione (Postmedia, 2023) examines the relationship between memory, history, identity construction, and the visual arts

She is a Research Fellow at the Department of the Arts, Alma Mater Studiorum – University of Bologna, working on topics related to cultural welfare. She completed the Advanced Training Programme for New Cultural Professions in “Cultural Innovators: processes, practices, methods” (Department of the Arts, Alma Mater Studiorum – University of Bologna, 2023) and the Master’s Programme in “Festivals and Cultural Events” at the Treccani Academy in Rome (2024). She holds a Master’s Degree in Information, Culture and Media Organisation (Alma Mater Studiorum – University of Bologna, 2023), with an experimental dissertation investigating the existence of a Creativity District in the city of Bologna from a cultural-welfare perspective.