Daphné Budasz is a historian and a fierce intersectional, decolonial, anti-racist feminist. In 2024, she defended her PhD at the EUI (Florence) with a dissertation titled “Cross-Cultural Intimacy, Imperial Migration, and Race in British East Africa (1895-1920s).” In it, she explored how racial, sexual, and gender norms were conceived, interpreted, experienced, and most importantly, challenged in a colonial context. Her background before was in Public History and Film Studies across universities in Switzerland, the UK and France.

As an independent researcher and cultural facilitator, she is involved in many research initiatives and civil society projects related to colonial heritage, antiracism, and gender equality. She co-founded the independent project Postcolonial Italy in 2018, a collaborative initiative that maps the material traces of Italian colonialism in public space. She is also the founder of Black History Month at the EUI and of the EUI Decolonising Initiative, and has organised dozens of events and activities on Black European history and its legacies. 

She has been commissioned on several occasions as a researcher and consultant for the House of European History of the European Parliament in Brussels. She has also recently worked for the NGO African Futures Lab on an advocacy project on racial justice and the coloniality of GBV against Black women in Belgium, the DR Congo and Senegal. Currently, she is co-writing a documentary film about the traces of the Italian colonial past in Sicily and the memories of postcolonial migration from Eritrea. She is also part of an EU-funded international consortium (CERV-2025) focused on European colonial history and the decolonisation of public space.