Born in Italy's port city of Genova, Monica Esposito studied Chinese at the Universita Ca'Foscari in Venice and Fudan University in Shanghai. After numerous prolonged sojourns in China during which she developed a deep interest in China's religious practices and their history, she published her first book in 1987 (La pratica del Qigong in Cina) and continued her studies in Paris under the direction of Isabelle Robinet, the noted specialist of Daoism. Her Ph.D. thesis on the Longmen tradition of Daoism (La Porte du Dragon, 1993), a pioneering deconstruction of a dominant foundation myth of modern Daoism, has become a classic in the field.From 1997 to 2011, Dr Esposito pursued her research in Japan, first as a postdoctoral fellow at Kansai University and then as Associate Professor at Kyoto University's Institute for Research in Humanities. In addition to six documentary films she published groundbreaking articles in English, Japanese, and Chinese that established her reputation as one of the world's foremost scholars of Daoism. She founded and directed the International Daozang jiyao Project with over sixty scientific collaborators studying this most important and voluminous canon of Daoist texts of the Qing dynasty. Creative Daoism presents the sum of twenty-five years of research.
