Cristiana Giordano is Professor in the Anthropology Department at the University of California, Davis. She is a a cultural and medical anthropologist.
Cristiana's research addresses the politics of migration and borders in Europe and the Mediterranean. Her book, Migrants in Translation. Caring and the Logics of Difference in Contemporary Italy (University of California Press, 2014) is an ethnographic account of migration through the lens of ethno-psychiatry and its radical critique of psychiatric, legal, and moral categories of recognition, and it was the recipient of the Victor Turner Book Prize for ethnographic writing (2016), and the Boyer Prize in Psychoanalytic Anthropology (2017). Her current research investigates new ways of rendering ethnographic material into artistic forms. In collaboration with playwright and director Greg Pierotti she has created a new methodology at the intersection of anthropology and performance and co-authored a book, Affect Ethnography: Exploring Performance and Narrative in the Creation of Unstories (Bloomsbury, 2024). They have also created Unstories and and Unstories II (roaming), two 50-minute performances around the current “refugee crisis” in Europe.
