Catterina Seia

Full biography

Co-Founder and Vice-President of the Fitzcarraldo Foundation since 2013, a leading research body dealing with the cultural policies of public entities, private bodies (in particular, institutional philanthropy) and public authorities, promoting and supporting the cross-sectoral innovation processes of culture and through culture, as well as the impact of civil, social and economic innovation, and the empowerment of people and communities.
Since 2009, she has been Vice President of the Medicina a Misura di Donna Foundation, the body that promotes gender-specific health, which she created together with ten other women from various backgrounds, based in the Gynaecology and Obstetrics Department of the Sant’Anna Hospital in Turin.
She set up and has been managing the first inter-disciplinary platform for research-action on the alliance between “Art, health and social change” for the Body since 2011, in which more than ninety cultural and cognitive establishments share their skills, studies and research with several other fields – medicine, human and social sciences. With the numerous pilot projects carried out and applied to a wide variety of contexts generating profound change, this platform is considered to be a role model for the commitment to the development of the virtuous relationship between cultural participation and the humanization of the healthcare and well-being of people and organizations, based on the growing, consolidated yet not widely known, clinical and scientific evidence that proves it.

On 8 March 2020, the first day of the first lock-down in Italy, in response to the pandemic crisis he founded, with other cross-over pioneers, the first cultural welfare research centre in Italy. CCW-Cultural Welfare Centre deals with advocacy, accompanying decision makers in policy development, research and capacity building with a school, CCW School, that builds hybrid professionalism between health, social, education, culture.
She encourages dissemination and discussion in particular through the management of editorial projects. From 2011 to 2019, after having overseen research reports, she headed the ”Giornale delle Fondazioni”. She is the scientific manager of “Arte e Impresa“, the newspaper of the “Giornale dell’Arte”, and the monthly publication of studies “Letture Lente” by AgCult.
By vocation, she has arrived on the social innovation scene by reading the effects of the financial crisis of 2009, bringing her personal experience and networks acquired through senior positions held in human resources management, communication management, and the management of the cultural investments made by international firms.

"A strategic project on the virtuous relationship between culture and bio-psychosocial well-being, based on consolidated scientific evidence, embraces the prospect that Health is not the exclusive responsibility of Health Systems but of every politician. Courageously promulgated at the start of the pandemic, it has emerged as a possible response for resilience, actually, the renaissance of people and communities. It causes public and private to talk openly, brings together research and impact practice starting from transdisciplinary higher education, the only thing that allows living in complexity as the only way for sustainable development, compensating the Cartesian fracture between art and science."

Catterina SeiaCo-Founder and President of CCW-Cultural Welfare Center; Co-Founder and Vice President of the Fitzcarraldo Foundation; Vice President of the Fondazione Medicina a Misura di Donna