Giuliana de Paola Gaspar de Mello

Brought up in Rio de Janeiro, Brazil, Giuliana holds a bachelor’s degree in international relations with a minor in Afro-Brazilian Studies from the Pontifical University of Rio de Janeiro. Much of her research has been devoted to the prison industrial complex and the imbrications of state power, capitalism, and incarceration, both in the US and Brazil.

Over her time as an undergraduate student, she spent a year studying abroad at the University of California, Berkeley. During that time, Giuliana worked for the Ella Baker Center for Human Rights, a nonprofit that promotes divesting from systems of incarceration and punishment and investing in strengthening marginalized communities. As a policy intern, she worked directly on decarceration policies moving through the California legislature, which allowed her to realize the radical potential of policy in the struggle to dismantle the prison industrial complex. By articulating the legal and technical concepts she had learned in theory with the community praxis she learned by working with incarcerated people and their loved ones, Giuliana has found her efforts in affecting real change to be the most useful in policy work. She is the recipient of a Donald & Marilyn Keough Fellowship.