Cecília Resende Santos

Cecília Resende Santos is a Ph.D. candidate specializing in the history of modern architecture and planning in the Americas. Her dissertation, supervised by Professor Zeynep Çelik Alexander, examines how aesthetic and economic ideas were trafficked between the worlds of architecture and commodity production during Brazil’s late nineteenth- and early twentieth-century coffee boom. In 2026-28, she will be an Andrew W. Mellon Fellow at the Center for Advanced Studies in the Visual Arts. Her research has also been supported by the Temple Hoyne Buell Center for the Study of American Architecture

Cecília has held positions at the 2019 Chicago Architecture Biennial, where she was Curatorial Fellow, the Art Institute of Chicago, and the Graham Foundation. In 2024-25, she was a Public Humanities Fellow at Columbia’s SOF/Heyman Center for the Humanities. She holds a B.A. with honors in Art History from the University of Chicago, where her thesis received the department’s Feitler Prize for Outstanding Undergraduate Work.