Academic Research

My research brings together medical anthropology, phenomenology and arts-based methods to investigate how people live through, make sense of and transform the experience of illness. Since my MA research on cancer experience, I have combined autoethnography with dance and film, and more recently developed co-creative movement practices with cancer survivors.

Phenomenology and autoethnography of illness

Drawing on autoethnography of my own illness experience, I use phenomenology to rethink illness, alterity and the “patient” body. This work includes my article in The Australian Journal of Anthropology (2022), awarded the Australian Anthropological Society Best Article Prize, my video essay in the Journal of Embodied Research (2019), and my chapter in Narrative Medicine: Trauma and Ethics (Vernon Press, 2024).

Arts and health and cancer survivorship

I investigate how co-creative dance practices can transform bodily awareness and agency after cancer, working with survivors through participatory, arts-based research. This work is developed in Medical Humanities (2026) and Qualitative Inquiry (2024), and in a forthcoming integrative review of dance in cancer survivorship in Arts & Health.

Transforming Illness Experience

A co-creative dance practice for young cancer survivors

The project investigates how co-creative dance practices can transform the lived experience of young cancer survivors. By bridging medical humanities, dance and performance studies, and participatory research, it explores embodiment, presence and movement as pathways to healing and bodily awareness.

Principal Investigator: Sarah Pini
Host institution: University of Southern Denmark (SDU), Department of Sports Science and Clinical Biomechanics
Partner institution: Aarhus University
Period: January 2024 – December 2025
Funding: Danish Cancer Society (KBVU-MS, DKK 1,290,000); Helsefonden (DKK 300,000)

Resisting the Patient Body

A phenomenological journey through illness and dance

Cinematic version of the video essay Resisting the ‘Patient’ Body: A Phenomenological Account published in the Journal of Embodied Research

Can a creative, embodied approach help us cope with the trauma of illness? This visual exploration applies a phenomenological lens and autoethnographic analysis to the lived experience of cancer, reimagining the “cancer event” through a performative perspective. Drawing on ten years of onco-hematological treatments and video dance performances, the video essay weaves together images and footage to show how dance and performative practices can open pathways for transformation.

Written, Performed and Narrated by Sarah Pini

Filmed and Edited by Ruggero Pini

Pini, S., & Pini, R. (2019). Resisting the ‘Patient’ Body: A Phenomenological Account. Journal of Embodied Research, 2(1), 2 (20:05). DOI: http://doi.org/10.16995/jer.11

INFINITO

A longitudinal screendance series on living with illness

INFINITO is a series of short screendance films created by Sarah Pini and Ruggero Pini. Born from a cancer diagnosis, each episode translates a stage of Sarah’s ten-year experience of living with illness into visual metaphors, blending dance, cinema and memory.

Episodes: Abisso (2018) · Risveglio (2021)

ABISSO (2018)

ABISSO is an experimental short film co-directed by Sarah Pini and Ruggero Pini

Through underwater screendance, it explores the relationship between body, illness, and transformation — turning fragility into movement and silence into presence.

Screened at festivals across Europe and Australia, including the International Underwater Film Festival Belgrade and Moving Images International Videodance Festival in Nicosia, the film earned Sarah Pini the 2019 CHASS Australia Prize for a Student in the Humanities, Arts and Social Sciences.