Marina Romani (Ph.D., UC Berkeley) is a film and music researcher, Italianist, and performer. Her doctoral dissertation, titled “Between Soundtrack and Performance: Music and History in Italian Film Melodrama, 1940–2010,” investigates how historical events are elaborated through cinema. Her areas of research include the phenomenology and politics of live performance, the racial politics of sound in post-Katrina New Orleans, Southern Italian folk music, and media seriality.

Dr. Romani has presented her original work at Yale, UCLA, NYU, and King’s College London, among others. She has taught courses on cinema and music, and she has developed and taught an original curriculum that integrates culture and language teaching with music and theater performance. She was a senior consultant for Film Quarterly, and served as a member of the jury at the first UN Women’s Global Voices Film Festival. With a background in both Western classical music and Afro-Caribbean music, she also frequently collaborates with the San Francisco Opera as a contributing writer and regularly performs with the group Aguacero.