Luisa G. Melo

Luisa G. Melo is a woman of color, interdisciplinary scholar, and visual artist from the marginalized periphery of Brasilia. She was trained as a graphic designer in Brazil and an urbanist in Mexico; she is currently a PhD student in City, Culture & Community at Tulane. Her scholarship is the result of a long academic journey where she has crafted a unique path that integrates the arts with the city’s social-spatial analysis and counter-hegemonic movements in Brazilian social peripheries. Each part of her personal-academic journey adds different colors to the lenses she uses to analyze practices of freedom emerging in the anti-Black city: her origin, identity, artistic training, broad geographical experiences, and community activism. She seeks to build spaces of freedom within her academic practice and community-engaged scholarship: thinking, theorizing, and organizing in the midst of “remembering we were never meant to survive” (Lorde 1997).