Sara Giannini is a curator, writer, and educator based in Amsterdam. With a background in theatre studies and semiotics, her curatorial research explores the interplay between language and performativity, using both as tools to unpack normative modes of knowledge production and transmission. Frameworks such as feminist/queer histories, performance studies, decoloniality, and disability justice inform, inspire, and challenge her praxis and life. Moving between different formats and roles—from exhibition curator to performance producer, from presenter to writer and pedagogue—she is committed to collaboration and remaining porous to different forms of relationalities, interdependencies, and temporalities.
After her studies in Italy, Sara moved to Germany, where she worked for the Global Art and the Museum Programme at the ZKM | Karlsruhe from 2010 to 2013. Life then brought her to Amsterdam, where she focused on her independent curatorial practice. Since 2020, she has been a core member of the Amsterdam-based arts organization If I Can’t Dance, I Don’t Want to Be Part of Your Revolution. As programme curator, she develops multifaceted art and research commissions in collaboration with artists, writers, and other practitioners active in the expansive field of performativity.
Together with artist Jacopo Miliani, she co-authored Whispering Catastrophe. On the Language of Men Loving Men in Japan (SelfPleasurePublishing, Milan, 2018), and with If I Can’t Dance, she published Maquillage as Meditation: Carmelo and the Undead (2021), a script of an absent event that evokes the (not very benevolent) spirit of Italian actor, director, and writer Carmelo Bene.
As a parent and caretaker, she has grown increasingly interested in the questions raised by the labor of invisible performances. One day, she hopes to turn this interest into a project titled Performances Not To Be Seen (courtesy Jeanette Ingberman & Exit Art, NYC).