Jasmine Clotilde Pisapia (b. Montréal) is an anthropologist and intermedial scholar working at the intersection between environmental anthropology, aesthetics, and critical theory. After completing her PhD in Sociocultural Anthropology at Columbia University in New York, she has been a Postdoctoral Fellow in the  Department of Anthropology at McGill University (SSHRC) and the Critical Media Lab in Montreal, as well as a Fellow at the Institute for Cultural Inquiry ICI Berlin.

She is currently a Visiting Assistant Professor at Ca’ Foscari University in Venice, where she teaches environmental and visual anthropology, as well as the anthropology of the Mediterranean. She is the Principal Investigator of a three year research project funded by the Italian Ministry of Research, and was recently awarded a Marie Skłodowska-Curie Fellowship. Using methods drawing from cinema, the performing arts, and geoanthropology, her new projects explore the relationship between environmental activist communities in the toxic 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. Her first book, Taken By Poison: Possession, Pollution, and the Flickering Image in Southern Italy, is forthcoming with Fordham University Press in 2027.

Alongside her scholarly and ethnographic work, she has collaborated with the NYC-based independent theater company New York City Players (with Richard Maxwell and Katiana 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-founded colletivo 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. She currently lives between Venice and Berlin.