Maestrini, Gabriella

Gabriella Maestrini has earned a PhD from the Department of Educational Studies (EDST) at The University of British Columbia, Canada, where she also works as adult education and humor instructor. Born and raised in Germany/ Italy, where she studied Modern Languages and Anthropology at the University of Pisa, Italy, Gabriella brings her own European humor sensibilities to her understanding of the ‘comic’. Her work focuses on the embodied aspects of the comic, the pedagogical, epistemological, and post-disaster possibilities of humor including the recent pandemic expressed through cartoons, memes, stand-up comedy and found street humor. In 2019/2020 she received a Mitacs grant which took her to Mexico City to work at the Faculty of Political and Social Sciences at the Universidad Nacional Autónoma de México (UNAM) with students on their understanding of post-disaster humor as performed cultural memory. She is also a trained visual artist who specializes in street photography.