I currently live and work on the unceded ancestral lands of the Bidjigal and Gadigal peoples of the Eora nation. I am internationally renowned in the field of Design History as a Latin American scholar whose work has expanded the discipline’s geographical and methodological reaches.

I left Brazil in 2003 to do my PhD at the V&A/RCA History of Design programme after having completed a bachelor’s degree in in Industrial and Graphic Design, and a master’s project in Graphic Design History. Since, I have earned a doctoral award and postdoctoral fellowships, published prize-winning research, and worked in several industry and academic positions in Brazil, the UK and now Australia. I have braved four international relocations and lived in half the planet’s continents.

This experience has led to a lifelong learning process that informs my personal ethics and research training philosophy. I am profoundly curious about how language, scholarly communication, contextual understanding, and conceptual thinking vary among different academic contexts.  

Broadly speaking, I study histories of design practice in postcolonial contexts—including design’s environmental, cultural, and social impacts. More specifically, I investigate transnational design networks formed in the Cold War period that led to the installation of modern design as a tool for economic development and neo-colonial expansion in Latin America. This work and methodology stem from my long-standing interest in transnational histories of International Exhibitions and World’s Fairs, which I have approached as designed infrastructures for nation-building and capitalist modernity formation.

For me, ‘how’ I research is as significant as ‘what’ I research. I am committed to research ethics and methods that advance intersectional histories, promote positionality and perspective sharing in scholarly and teaching practices, and overturn oppressive academic canons and conventions. In critically reassessing archival methodologies and developing collaborative history writing, I have contributed to expanding decolonial praxis in academic work and design practice.