Paola Melchiori is the founder and past president of The Women’s Free University in Milan, and Crinali, the research and intercultural education association. She is also present president of the International Feminist University Network, an international think-tank for women’s critical thinking and education. These Free Universities are committed to carrying on participatory research and refining methodologies to collect the history of “invisible groups” in society and making them available for the public and for future generations.

For more than 25 years, Melchiori has created national and international free spaces of critical thinking, teaching and learning in order to develop and make visible new paradigms of knowledge, based on everyday people and the manner that women “know” and learn. She has been working in an interdisciplinary way across cultures, classes and specializations to recombine what a dualistic civilization has divided: knowledge and practice, theory and action, mind and body activities, etc.

With this approach she has worked as a consultant for the World Bank, the European Union, the Italian Government, the Trade Unions and different NGOs in the implementation and evaluation of educational projects in the context of international co-operation, mainly in Southern and West Africa, and in Latin America. During the 90’s, she actively participated in the UN Conferences for Human Development and later participated and organized feminist international meetings and conferences in Italy, Sweden, Norway and the Middle East.

Having worked with many people in different countries, she has built a solid network of global leaders, academics, artists, social activists, and political leaders, who seek to cultivate meaningful, holistic knowledge in an interdisciplinary, action-oriented, and personally and spiritually meaningful manner. This knowledge is intended to be used by and further developed by future generations.

Melchiori’s background is in philosophy, anthropology and psychoanalysis. She is author of three books, and co-editor of seven collections of oral history. She has written more than 70 articles and reports about feminist theory and on the topics of knowledge creation, interdisciplinary and relational learning, and education. Many of these have been published in reviews and anthologies, in English, Italian, French and Spanish.

She has also produced three videos on international struggles of women in Argentina, Iceland and Albania.  Melchiori is currently focussing on how to pass on experiences, memory, history to young women and men, through written and visual texts. In the last few years, she has spoken at international conferences, including: the International Conference on Degrowth (Venice, 2012); International Global Leadership Meeting (Rio de Janeiro, 2010); and Another (M)otherworld is possible (Toronto 2010).