Brunno Douat is a multidisciplinary spatial practitioner,
curator and researcher.






Contact


+1 475 280 8211
brunno@brunnodouat.com




Education


Yale School of Architecture
(2021—2023, New Haven)

Master of Environmental Design
To Open a Clearing: cultivating spaces of endurance in the Upper Amazon
Advisors: prof. Ana Maria Durán Calisto & prof. Keller Easterling

Universidade Federal do Paraná
(2012—2018, Curitiba)

Bachelor in Architecture, Urban Design and Planning
Advisor: prof. Letícia Nerone Gadens

Parsons — The New School of Design
(2014–2015, New York)

Visiting student at the M.Arch program

Harvard Extension School —
Graduate School of Design
(2015, Cambridge)

Designing the American City: Civic Aspirations and Urban Form




Work


2024-present
Eduardo Kohn
McGill University Department of Anthropology

Research Assistant


2023-2024
MoMA - The Museum of Modern Art
12-month curatorial training in the 
Architecture and Design Department

2022-2024
a83
Curatorial Assistant and Writer


2023
Yale Architecture Gallery
Exhibition Assistant

Yale School of Architecture
Teaching Fellow
Latin American Modernity: Architecture, Art, and Utopia, with prof. Luis Carranza

2022
Yale Tropical Resources Institute (TRI)
Research Fellow
Award: TRI Endowment Fellowship

Yale Beinecke Rare Book & Manuscript Library

Research Fellow
Award: Walter McClintock Memorial Fellowship for Graduate Students

Yale School of Architecture
Teaching Fellow
Senior Research Colloquium, with prof. Marta Caldeira

Teaching Assistant
Method and Modernism: Contemporary Approaches to the History of Modern Architecture, with prof. Joan Ockman

2019–2021
Museu Paranaense (Curitiba)
Architect, and Exhibition Designer

2019–2021
BOMBUS (Curitiba) 
Architect and Designer, co-founder with Ingrid Schmaedecke

2017–2021
ATO1LAB (Curitiba) 
Architect and Designer 

2015 
Chibbernoonie (New York) 
Trainee

Exhibitions

[Curatorial Work]

Upcoming (2026)
Still to be announced
The Museum of Modern Art (MoMA)
Researcher

Upcoming (2026)
Yale School of Architecture
Faculty Exhibition 

Yale Architecture Gallery
Curatorial Assistant

Upcoming (2026)
Dien-Dien: To Feel the Other and Weave a Territory
a83
Curator

2024
Crafting Modernity: Design in Latin America, 1940–1980
The Museum of Modern Art (MoMA)
Researcher

2023
Surfacing — The Civilised Agroecological Forests of Amazonia
Venice Architecture Biennale 2023
The Laboratory of the Future
Researcher

2022
SOS Brutalism
Yale Architecture Gallery
Curatorial Assistant






Brunno Douat is a multidisciplinary spatial practitioner, curator and researcher.
CV

Projects

brunno@brunnodouat.com

To Open a Clearing: Cultivating Spaces of Endurance in the Upper Amazon



To effectively challenge the policies of extraction and depletion implemented by late liberal regimes, the Waorani communities residing in the Ecuadorian Amazon have devised spatial strategies to preserve their traditional territory. By reexamining Mary Louise Pratt's concept of the contact zone and delving into the juxtaposition between settler and Indigenous literature, spatialities, and worldviews, this thesis suggests the concept of forest Clearings as a means to explore spatial forms of endurance.

    Numerous Clearings emerge within the Amazon, where encounters between divergent worldviews have engendered otherwise modes of existence. These spaces originate from mutualistic relationships between ants and plants, the material necessities for cultivating cacao and economic trees within traditional gardens amidst the forest, the aspiration to establish new settlements or reclaim former ones adjacent to oil platforms to assert sovereignty over traditional territories, and acts of weaving and singing while renewing a corporeal connection with the Amazon. Through a series of fieldwork reflections drawing upon Elizabeth Povinelli's notion of quasi-events, these Clearings are perceived as spaces where ontological negotiations are more likely to occur, strategies of enduring exhaustion are nurtured, potentiality is sheltered, and forms of dominance—even if for a moment—rattle.

    At the core of the thesis narrative lies the ambition of a particular Waorani community to establish a Museo Vivo, or a living museum, on the outskirts of the city of Coca. While scrutinizing the intertwined histories of museums as hegemonic infrastructures that facilitate extractive colonial projects in the region, this work nevertheless recognizes the Waorani's appropriation of the museum as a trap to ensnare our attention and redirect the focus towards a more pressing matter: the defense of their territory. Serving as a spatial strategy to withstand the exhaustion caused by extractive practices in the Amazon, the living museum can be viewed as the creation of a Clearing—an emancipation from prevailing forms of dominance through the subversion of hegemonic ontologies. Within the Clearing, dominant self-identities "get mixed up," inviting individuals to transcend their existing roles and fostering alternative life forms capable of sustaining a stubborn refusal to collapse.

    In essence, this work serves as an invitation to acknowledge our own agency as researchers, academics, architects, and artists when navigating the ambivalent movements of establishing and suppressing Clearings during interactions with local communities like the Waorani. The work proposes that assuming responsibility as active agents within the social ecology of Clearings—embracing the condition of being "seen seen" by one another—gives rise to new collaborative practices and ontological exchanges.



Master of Environmental Design thesis at the Yale School of Architecture.

Advisors:

Ana Maria Durán Calisto,
Keller Easterling

2021-2023