Both the women’s movement – dominated by white, non-Roma women – and the Roma political movement – largely dominated by Roma men – did not respond adequately to the needs and interests of Romani women. This led to the emergence of Romani feminism, as a platform for Romnia’s emancipation and agency Roma arts and culture played a vital role in this process, galva- nizing visibility around Romani women’s rights and becoming a tool to articulate passionately and powerfully the Romnia’s agenda. This lecture,delivered by dr. Anna Mirga-Kruszelnicka, will trace the genealogy of Romani feminism at the intersection of cultural and political movements in Europe.

Dr. Anna Mirga-Kruszelnicka is an anthropologist and a Roma activist, born in 1985 in Cracow, Poland. She earned her Ph.D. in Social and Cultural Anthropology at the Universitat Autònoma de Barcelona (UAB) in 2016. She holds an MA in European Integration from UAB and an MA in Comparative Studies of Civilizations from the Jagiellonian University in Cracow (UJ).

She has been an employee, member, founder, and collaborator of numerous Roma organisations in Poland and Spain. From 2008 to 2012 she was the European project coordinator at the Federation of Roma Associations in Catalonia (FAGIC). From 2013 to 2015 she was an Open Society Foundations Roma Initiatives Fellow, conducting a comparative study of the Roma associative movements in various countries of Latin America and Europe. From 2015 to 2017 she was the coordinator and curator of the Academic Section (aka. Roma Civil Rights Movement Section) in the RomArchive – Digital Archive of the Roma. Between 2017-2018 she was a Post-Doctoral Research Fellow of the Romani Studies Program at the Central European University (CEU) in Budapest. She serves as the deputy director of the European Roma Institute for Arts and Culture (ERIAC) since January 2018.