Luisa Maffi is an Italian American anthropologist who is co-founder and Director of Terralingua,[1] an international NGO devoted to sustaining the biocultural diversity of life - the world’s biological, cultural, and linguistic diversity - through research, education, policy-relevant work, and on-the-ground action.
[6] After completing her bachelor's degree, she worked on an Italian government project to produce a Somali reference grammar and dictionary.
[5] Maffi became interested in Somali color terms, and was encouraged to go to graduate school at University of California, Berkeley by Brent Berlin.
With a background in linguistics, anthropology, and ethnobiology, she has conducted fieldwork in Somalia, Mexico, China and Japan.
In 1998-2003 she was a Research Associate in the Anthropology Department at the Field Museum of Natural History in Chicago, Illinois, and in 1999-2004 a Research Associate in the Anthropology Department at the Smithsonian Institution’s National Museum of Natural History in Washington, D.C.