While completing her BA in Comparative Literature at Columbia University, she obtained a grant from the Margaret Mead Institute of Intercultural Studies for the project, The Prince and the Pauper: Two Balinese Portraits. Her book, The Epic of Life: A Balinese Journey of the Soul, recounts a universal epic depicted on the ceiling paintings of the ancient court of justice of Bali in Indonesia.

She later produced the award-winning documentary-feature, Eugenia of Patagonia, on the pioneering life in Chile of her grand-aunt who founded a town at the end of world, and served for years as mayor of a vast region, battling for the people and the environment.

Having obtained the International Diploma of Humanitarian Assistance from the CIHC in New York, Idanna then served with the Open Society Institute in Burma and the United Nations in East Timor.

Her work, Brazza in Congo: A Life and Legacy (Umbrage Editions, NY) is an illustrated biography of another ancestor, the explorer Pietro Savorgnan di Brazzà, after whom Brazzaville, the capital of the Republic of Congo, is named. She then conceived and narrated the award-winning documentary Black Africa White Marble, which recounts her battle against the present-day ruler of Congo-Brazzaville.

In 2015, she co-curated The Transformative Power of Art, an exhibition at the United Nations in New York.

With her husband, Terence Ward, she also produced Talk Radio Tehran, a documentary that follows high-spirited Iranian women as they fulfill their aspirations in spite of the gender-apartheid that dominates the country.

Her book, The World Odyssey of a Balinese Prince (Tuttle, 2020) is a collection of true stories between East and West, on the extraordinary life of a cultural visionary and medical doctor.

The Lady of Sing Sing: an American Countess, an Italian Immigrant, and their Epic Battle for Justice in New York’s Gilded Age (Simon & Schuster, Tiller Press, 2020) is a new expanded edition of an earlier work. It focuses on her American great-grandmother, Cora Slocomb, who began the first campaign against the death penalty in 1895 to save from execution a twenty-year old poor Italian immigrant, Maria Barbella, the first woman sentenced to the electric chair.

Idanna is fluent in Italian, English and French, and speaks reasonable Bahasa Indonesia. She resides with her husband between Florence and New York.

www.terence-idanna.com