LUÍSA SANTOS (1980, Lisbon) trained as a Communication Designer (5 year Degree at Faculty Fine Arts Lisbon - 1998-2003) and worked as a Designer in Advertising and Design Studios between 2003 and 2006, in Portugal and Italy. In 2006, Luisa Santos moved to London, where she mastered in Curating Contemporary Art at the Royal College of Art, with the support of Gulbenkian Foundation (2006-2008), Serviço de Artes (Arts Department). Since then she has been working as independent curator, having lived in England, Austria, Denmark, Germany and Belgium. In 2015, she was awarded her PhD on multidisciplinary approaches in art for social change, in the frame of the CCCPM programme (SEgroup and Humboldt-Viadrina School of Governance, Berlin). In 2016, she was awarded a Gulbenkian Professorship and appointed Assistant Professor at the Faculty of Human Sciences of Universidade Católica Portuguesa, in Lisbon. Luisa Santos' projects reveal a special interest in critically thinking the social role of art and the art institution as well as the formats and methodologies associated with it. Her most recent experiences include her position as Executive Curator of the first edition of Anozero: Coimbra Biennial of Contemporary Art (2015) and curator of the European Exhibition of the CreArt Network that traveled along Aveiro (PT), Kaunas (LT), and Kristiansand (NO) in 2016. Since 2017, she is coordinating the European Cooperation project 4Cs: from Conflict to Conviviality through Creativity and Culture, a 4-year long project co-funded by the European Commission through Creative Europe. Lead by Universidade Católica Portuguesa, the project brings together together institutional partners such as Tensta Konsthall, SAVVY Contemporary – Laboratory of Form-Ideas, Royal College of Art, Fundació Antoni Tápies, Vilnius Academy of Fine Arts, Museet for Samtidskunst, and ENSAD to explore the role of artistic institutions on emerging forms of conflict. In 2018, she co-founded, with Ana Fabíola Maurício, the nanogaleria, an independent curatorial project space resting upon an endless curiosity regarding human, social, and cultural relationships.