Afro Italians: Stories of Resistance, Renaissance, and Community

Daphne Di Cinto is a Black Italian screenwriter, director, actor, and producer. She began her film and theatre studies in Rome, where she focused on acting at Scuola di Cinema, while getting her degree in Communication Science at Roma Tre University. She attended the faculty of cinema at Sorbonne University in Paris before moving to New York for her Master in Fine Arts at the Actors Studio Drama School. As an actor, she played the Duchess of Hastings in the Netflix series Bridgerton. Il Moro, her directorial debut, was longlisted for an Oscar in 2024. As a screenwriter, she has developed both features and series within various genres, from comedy to sci-fi, with a keen interest in topics such as historical memory, identity, migrations, and the female gaze. Daphne is the recipient of the Cultured Focus Visionary in Film Award 2022 and the Leader of Change in Creativity Award at the 2023 Black Carpet Awards.

Medhin Paolos is a filmmaker, photographer, musician, and social justice activist. Her work focuses on diaspora, citizenship rights, migration, and queerness. For ten years, Paolos was part of the folk-electronic band Fiamma Fumana, which celebrates the female vocal tradition of the Mondine of Northern Italy. She performed internationally at venues like Melkweg, Womex, and the Kennedy Center in Washington, DC. Paolos is the co-founder of the Milan chapter of Rete G2-Seconde Generazioni, a national organization that promotes the human and civic rights of descendants of immigrants in Italy. In recent years, she has been awarded fellowships at Harvard University, MIT Institute of Technology, and Wellesley College, where she conceptualized “Archives of Justice,” an educational platform for bringing a plurality of voices, histories, and cultures to the forefront through media and artistic interventions. She was a Professor of the Practice at Tufts University before joining the Lewis Center for the Arts at Princeton University in the fall of 2023.

Stephanie Malia Hom is Professor of Transnational Italian Studies at UC Santa Barbara. She writes and lectures on modern Italy and the Mediterranean, mobility studies, colonialism and imperialism, migration and detention, and tourism history and practice. She is the author of Empire’s Mobius Strip: Historical Echoes in Italy’s Crisis of Migration and Detention (Cornell University Press, 2019) and The Beautiful Country: Tourism and the Impossible State of Destination Italy (University of Toronto Press, 2015). She also co-edited Italian Mobilities (Routledge, 2016) with Ruth Ben-Ghiat.