Red Lily (Beatrice Gigliuto)

Beatrice Gigliuto, who works as Red Lily, is a shibari teacher, rigger and performer based in Copenhagen. Her site describes her as Italian-born and as a certified sexologist and trauma-informed relational coach as well as a rope artist, and her teaching practice in Copenhagen carries the same name. The experience she states for rope varies by page: more than a decade of teaching and performing across Europe and beyond on her About page, and more than fifteen years on her course and shibari pages.

Approach

According to her About page, she came to shibari through an interest in what the body can express and in the trust between people, and she treats rope both as an art form and as a way to explore communication, vulnerability and relationships. She calls her approach to rope human, intuitive and heartfelt, and describes her teaching as intersectional, trauma-informed and consent-based, with weight on pacing, communication, body awareness and aftercare. Her shibari page presents the practice as identity-affirming and open to all genders, bodies, orientations and relationship structures, and states that her private rope sessions are non-sexual. She teaches and coaches in English and Italian, in person in Copenhagen and online.

Teaching

In Copenhagen she runs multi-session beginner courses; one began in September 2026 with nine group classes and a one-to-one session, in groups limited to six couples or twelve individuals. Some of her beginner series have been reserved for queer women and non-binary people, and others are open to all genders. Her course pages also list classes on suspension foundations, nerve safety (“Nerding Nerves”, also given online), consent, self-tying with mindfulness, and couples’ work, as well as shibari nights that mix a performance, teaching and free practice, and Queer Knots rope jams. A course guide says she also teaches at Sexologi Skolen, a sexology school.

Outside Copenhagen, her listings include a beginner course and a continuation course in Malmö from 2025, a June 2025 workshop in Norrköping moving from ichinawa to full-body ties, and an intermediate-to-advanced intensive called “As water shapes the rocks” in Brussels in February 2025 and Trieste in May 2025. The Brussels description says it explored the interplay of aibu and seme, minimalist and maximalist ties, and more personal, deconstructed approaches, with partial or full suspension options. In April 2026 she taught “Di terra e aria”, an Italian-language intermediate intensive in Rome on predicament bondage and on handling physical and emotional tension, and she offers online beginner and second-level courses in Italian under the title Legami.

Queer Knots

She leads Queer Knots Copenhagen and is the founder and artistic director of the Queer Knots Festival, which her site describes as an international gathering on queer perspectives in rope and relationships. The November 2025 edition at her venue in Copenhagen ran for three days with about eighteen hours of classes, workshops and round tables in two rooms, rope jams, five performances and a play party, taught by seven queer educators from Berlin, London, Bristol, Athens and Barcelona. A further edition, subtitled Playing Heat, was scheduled for late November 2026.