Ecuatorian architect, urban-environmental planner, researcher and writer. She is a PhD candidate in the Department of Urban Planning at UCLA, with a thesis on the history of urbanization in the Amazon Basin. In 2010 she received a Loeb Fellowship from the GSD of Harvard University to develop an open research network dedicated to study the phenomenon of infrastructural integration in South America. The network took shape as the South America Project in collaboration with Professor Felipe Correa. In 2000, Durán Calisto graduated from the Master of Architecture program at the University of Pennsylvania with a certificate in historic preservation. Her undergraduate degree was developed in a program that she proposed and helped delineate, the USFQ Liberal Arts program, from which she was the first to graduate in 1995 with a major in anthropology and minors in comparative literature, art history and theater. In 2002, Durán Calisto co-founded Estudio A0 with her partner and business partner, Indo-British architect Jaskran Kalirai. Since its inception, Estudio A0 has developed projects of diverse scales, from furniture to urban plans, always trying to satisfy the desires and needs of its clients while promoting a vision of socio-environmental responsibility in design. Estudio A0 has won several national and international awards and its works have been published in Latin America, North America, Europe and Asia. Durán Calisto has co-edited the books Beyond Petropolis: Designing a Practical Utopia in Nueva Loja (ORO Publishers) and Urbanismo Ecológico en América Latina (Editorial GG). Her essays have been published in several books and magazines. Línea Imaginaria published her first book of poetry in 2010. She has been a professor at the Pontificia Universidad Católica del Ecuador since 2002. She has been a visiting professor at the University of Michigan, Harvard University and Columbia University. She currently teaches research seminars and participates in workshops at Yale University, while finishing her dissertation and developing a Collective for the Study of Amazonian Urbanisms. At the same time, she is working to consolidate a foundation dedicated to supporting communities with productive forest remediation projects on abandoned ranches in the Ecuadorian Amazon.
