Dr. Vitagrazia Pisani received her master’s degree in 2008 and her doctorate in Gǝʿǝz Philology from the University of Naples ‘L’Orientale’ in 2013.  

Her master’s thesis was a critical edition of the Gǝʿǝz Passio of Saint Pantaleon from Nicomedia (Gadla Ṗanṭalewon) and her Ph.D. thesis was a critical edition of the Gǝʿǝz Passio of Saint Cyricus (Gadla Qirqos).

She worked for five years (2009-2015) as a research assistant on the European Research Council funded project called Ethio-SPaRe: The Cultural Heritage of Christian Ethiopia: Salvation, Preservation, Research, chaired by Dr. Denis Nosnitsin and based at the Hiob Ludolf Centre for Ethiopian Studies at Hamburg University. Her main tasks were cataloging Ethiopian medieval manuscripts in the project’s database and active participation in field research and digitizing missions in North Ethiopia (eight research trips in 2010-14). 

She also worked for five years (2014-2019) as a research assistant on the European Research Council funded project called TraCES: From Translation to Creation: Changes in Ethiopic Style and Lexicon from Late Antiquity to the Middle Ages, chaired by Prof. Alessandro Bausi, and also based at the Hiob Ludolf Centre for Ethiopian Studies at Hamburg University. Her main task for the project has been the morphological annotation (with the electronic tool GeTa) of two texts of the Ethiopian Christian Literature: The Chronicle of ʿĀmda Ṣǝyon and the Gadla ʾAzqir.

She began working on PEMM in 2020, working to identify and catalog Marian miracle stories in manuscripts. In that capacity, she worked on the royal manuscript EMML 9002, created in December 1400, now believed to be the very first Täˀammərä Maryam.  She also worked on Princeton University Library Ethiopic Collection manuscript no. 8.