Thalia Gigerenzer is a cultural anthropologist and multi-media artist whose research focuses on atmospheres, emotions, gender, urban space, poetics and conviviality in contemporary South Asia. Her dissertation research focused on the everyday lives of low-income Muslim women in Delhi, India, looking at their efforts to maintain the vibrancy of their communities in the face of political violence and insecurity. At the heart of her teaching and research is a strong commitment to collaborative, community-engaged scholarship. Her research has been supported by the Fulbright-Hays Program, the Charlotte Newcombe Foundation, and the Global Religion Research Institute at the University of Notre Dame. At Princeton, she was a Rockefeller Fellow at the Center for Human Values, and a fellow at the Center for the Study of Religion.

Drawing on her experience as a former journalist and radio producer, Thalia's research employs collaborative, multi-media storytelling methods. Her ethnographic films and audio documentaries have been screened at anthropology conferences and showcased in anthropology journals. Her award-winning journalistic work has been published in the New York Times, National Public Radio, BBC Radio, and Germany's Frankfurter Allgemeine Zeitung, among others. 

Her first academic book,The Memory Laboratories, explored collective memory in post-communist East Germany through photography, oral history and archival work. Thalia is currently working on a second project, Breathing Space: Creativity and Play in a Toxic Environment, which looks at how pollution is reshaping the social lives of children in low-income areas of Delhi, India.

She holds a BA in South Asian Studies from the University of Chicago, an MA in Social Anthropology from SOAS in London, and a PhD in Anthropology from Princeton University.