Ciao! Welcome!
I’m Nancy Perin, a sociologist, cultural activist, storyteller, and executive director of the Gallery of Human Migration in Toronto. I write about identity, migration, moral courage, and what it actually costs to be human in a world that would rather you stay quiet and keep things smooth. Sociology is how I look. Story is how I speak. And I am not here to produce content. I am here because something real is at stake, and you already know it.
This is my story of how I came to know that.
I didn’t choose sociology because I wanted a career. I chose it because I needed a language for what I had always felt but couldn’t yet name—that the stories people tell about themselves, and the stories societies tell about who belongs, are not the same story. And that the distance between them is where most human suffering lives.
For over twenty years in Italy, I worked at that distance. In communities navigating change. In organisations where people needed not just leadership but genuine witness—someone who could see what was actually happening beneath the surface of what was being said. I coached, I facilitated, I built. And I learned that the most effective tool in every room was always the same: a story told with enough courage and enough specificity that it gave the people in that room permission to recognise themselves.
When I came back to Canada in 2019, I brought all of it with me—the sociological lens, the twenty-four years of living deeply in another culture, the grief of leaving, the relief of returning, and the complicated joy of having more than one home. And I brought the question I hadn’t been able to stop asking: what does it cost a person to belong somewhere? And what does it cost them not to?
That question is what this blog, the Gallery, and everything I write are built on. Not as theory. As lived experience that refuses to stay quiet.
My grandmother’s kitchen smelled of grape must in September. My sister and I pressed the harvest barefoot in the stone vat, giggling until our feet went purple, and nobody told us to be careful with our clothes. The point was the pressing. The mess. That we were together and the harvest was in and the whole village could smell it through the open window.
That is what I mean when I say I believe in connection. Not the word. The purple feet. The particular sound a grape makes when it gives.
I grew up in a house where music started without an excuse. A guitar came out on a Tuesday because someone felt like it. The table was always a little too small for everyone who sat at it, and nobody ever thought to get a bigger one. What my parents built around that table—and around the work they did beside people who needed them—was something I didn’t have a name for until much later: that caring for the relationship between people is not the soft option. It is the whole point.
I still live from that. I live from it when I sit with someone whose story is breaking open and I know that the only thing required of me is to stay. I live from it when I am in a room full of people from different countries who have never had a reason to speak to each other, and something shifts; a shared laugh, a recognition, and the room becomes something it wasn’t before.
I trained as a Laughter Yoga teacher while I was caring for my father, in the last years of his life, in the middle of everything that was hard and could not be fixed. The discipline claims you can laugh without cause. It sounds absurd. It was one of the most serious things I have ever learned: that joy is not the absence of grief. It is a decision you make inside it. Stay mindful. Stay sustainable. Stay open, even when nothing around you invites you to.
That is what I carry into every room I enter, every story I tell, every piece of writing I send out into the world. Not a philosophy. A practice. One ordinary day at a time.
There is a photograph of my father and me — him in his wheelchair, me beside him, both of us in the sun. It was taken by our friend and neighbour Francesco, who has since passed, and who I like to think is with my father now, somewhere where neither of them is tired anymore.
My father had bone cancer. Pain was not an interruption to his days — it was the ground he lived on. Which means that every moment of joy was a conquest. Not a gift. A decision. He chose, that day and on so many others, to laugh anyway. I have never forgotten what it taught me about what courage actually looks like when no one is watching and nothing is being performed—when it is just a person, choosing, in the face of what cannot be changed.
I think of that photograph when I think of everyone who has held me. My mother. My sister. My son Davide. Rocco. And the women in Italy — the ones I grew up with, went to school with, sat through university examinations beside, worked alongside, the ones who have heard me cry and made me laugh until crying and laughing became the same thing. The ones I call my sisters because that is simply what they are, whatever a passport says about where we each belong.
When I returned to Canada in 2019, I did not bring them with me. I brought their love, which is not the same as having them near. I arrived into a life I was still building — without the easy shorthand of shared history, without the friends who already knew the whole story. Seven years on, I am still building. And what I have built here is real, and it is mine, and it has been one of the quiet conquests of this chapter of my life.
I won’t name everyone here because you know who you are. But I want to say it plainly, to all of you, on both sides of the ocean: you made me possible. The sociologist, the storyteller, the woman who finally came home — none of her exists without the people who believed in her when she was still figuring out what she was becoming.
I carry you with me. Into every story I tell. Into every room I enter. Into every word I write for the woman reading this who is still, perhaps, looking for her own people.
You’ll find them. That I can promise.
I didn’t tell you all of this so you could admire the journey.
I told you because somewhere in these pages, I believe you recognized something. A displacement you couldn’t name. A belonging you’re still searching for. A voice inside you that has been waiting for permission to speak.
This is that permission.
We are living in a moment that desperately needs people who remember where they come from, who carry more than one world inside them, and who refuse to let fear be the last word. Most people stay silent because they believe their story isn’t big enough, important enough, or safe enough to share.
Yours is. Mine was too, once.
So here is what I am asking of you: don’t just read. Join. Bring your story, your roots, your questions, your courage — however small it feels right now. This is not a metaphor. There is an actual place for it.
The Gallery of Human Migration was built on the belief that migration is not a problem to be solved—it is a fundamental human right, a legacy of courage, and one of the most powerful forces shaping who we are. As its executive director, I can tell you what I have witnessed over and over again: ordinary lives, when shared with courage, become something extraordinary. Not because they are polished. Because they are true.
Your story belongs in the Gallery. Not someday. Now. Because the human community we need isn’t built by heroes—it’s built by ordinary people who decided, one day, that their voice mattered.
That day can be today.
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