Maria Grazia Montella is an urban anthropologist with a PhD in Urban Planning at Sapienza University of Rome, having written her thesis on the impact of urban planning policies on the integration of migrants in Rome and Amsterdam. She won a Marie Curie ITN Fellowship at the University of Poitiers, Laboratoire Migrinter from 2015-2017, and was a member of the IMISCOE PhD group. She has worked for several migrant organisations in Brussels, writing and managing European-funded projects on migrant socio-economic, political and spatial inclusion (MAX project, RIDE project, MILE project).
She is currently working at the Council of European Municipalities and Regions, the oldest and most wide-ranging European association of local and regional governments. As a project manager for IncluCities (an AMIF funded project connecting 8 EU cities in order to improve integration at local level), she coordinates city-to-city collaboration, the strategic sharing of good practices and local solutions for improving inclusion practices. She is also Policy Coordinator for the CEMR Task Force on Migration and Integration, and recently founded INTEGRIM Lab, an independent think-and-do tank based in Brussels.
