Dr Nicole Paganini is a feminist researcher and co-founder of WEAVE Strategies. For more than a decade, she has worked in Cape Town on the links between food insecurity, gender-based violence and social inequality, with a particular focus on the food–violence nexus and on transforming urban food systems to make them more just and sustainable. In 2025, she completed Urban Food Futures, a four-year action-research programme led by TMG Research, a Berlin-based think tank. Her work draws on feminist, decolonial and participatory methods, with a particular love for arts-based approaches that bring together lived experience, creativity and social transformation. Nicole holds a PhD from the University of Hohenheim for her research on urban agriculture from a food justice perspective.