I am an intercultural or multi-cultural person. I was born and raised Brazilian, moved as a young adult to England to learn the language and from there, in my typical mode of curiosity, I discovered a world outside of Brazil and have never stopped moving and exploring – after England, my next step was to the USA for my PhD and then on to Taiwan, Singapore and finally to The Netherlands. All these movements, and the intertwined experiences that have accompanied them, have given me the expertise to work with diversity within international teams, as well as to grow an international network where I collaborate developing projects for social impact in communities and organizations. I work at the interface of psychology, design thinking, imagineering, social innovation and life-long learning. I hold a Ph.D. from my native Brazil at the University of Sao Paulo in cooperation with the University of New Hampshire, in the United States.  I host and facilitate workshops using active methodologies  for dialogic interaction and collaboration. As a researcher I work with participatory approaches of designing inquiry such as action research, arts-based research, narrative research and future-forming research.

My current academic and professional practice are focusing on designing conversations and designing research and you can see in this website my activities around these two domains.

Bellow some of the core Institutions/Programs  I work with:

IN THE NETHERLANDS.

I’m faculty at Breda University of Applied Science where I am involved in  innovative international Masters. One is called Imagineering. The Imagineering Master is a  Masters focused on designing solutions for complex matters.  The accent is on educating co-creative catalysts to ignite  change at a strategic organizational levels. I teach, coach and supervise students on this Programme. The other masters is called Tourism Destination Management, focusing on practice, perspectives and policies of tourism management at destinations. At this masters I teach context-related research and coach in Team Performance and Creative Leadership. I’m also connected to the Performatory, a special track on social innovation, and also involved in a Minor course called Placemaking Shaping destination focusing on developing places and spaces to increase the livability of a region, helping creating resilient communities through sustainable business.

Furthermore, I am a Registered Educator at the National Institute in the Netherlands for the CRKBO (Dutch “Centraal Register Kort Beroepsonderwijs”).

 

IN BRASIL.

As a Brazilian and passionate about my country, I’m still connected with many universities as a visiting professor, also partnering with organizations and communities such as the NGO Comunidade Cultural Quilombaque.

I also collaborate with  Co-Viva: a consultancy company focused on the power of co-creation to bring people together.

AROUND THE WORLD.

I am an Associate  and Board Member of the TAOS Institute, a non-profit institute, a community of scholars and practitioners engaged in developing and sharing social constructionist ideas. At Taos,  I’m a Ph.D supervisor, workshop facilitator and  a distance learning trainer.

I am also an International Consultant at The California Institute of Integral Studies where I teach and sit at some Defense Committee at their PhD Program Transformative Studies.

I am a trainer at the OneWhy,  a social entreprise that works at the intersection of business-school-communities, that is matching real life challenges with learning opportunities.

I’m a researcher at Designing research. The goal here is to build a community of researcher from around the world to learn and share ideas and practices around future-forming research.

I am a board member of Team Together, a non-profit foundation that works with communities in Uganda. We co-create projects together aiming to develop healthier, safer and happier communities. We work closely with Hope for Youth Uganda, a registered local NGO operating in rural communities with a mission to improve the quality of life of vulnerable children and young adults, and Health Nest Uganda, focused on the vision of having an empowered and pro- active; that can respond effectively and efficiently to problems related to health and other social needs.

I am a research member of the Systems Beings Lab, a collaborative research collective affiliated with the University of British Columbia, Canada. As a research group, our primary aim is to facilitate and enhance diverse approaches to understanding and work with relational approaches, complexity and systems thinking. Our work involves process-oriented methodologies that promote non-linear dynamics in (un)learning. invoke deeper epistemic and ontological questions around the nature of the world, including our knowledge of and interactive relationship to the world. Responding to emergent literacy practices, we – as systems beings – enact multiple ways of knowing and learning (epistemologies) coupled with how we experience and co-construct the nature of reality as beings (ontologies).