São Paulo, Brazil, 1992.
Currently living and working in Brooklyn, New York.
Gabriela’s work moves across disciplines, inhabiting the space between interdisciplinary design practices, architecture, and art — operating in the relational space where material, body, and environment form systems of mutual influence. Her practice unfolds as an inquiry into material, form, and meaning, exploring how processes of research and experimentation can open new ways of perceiving and relating to the world — where physical representation is inseparable from the temporal, social, and ecological forces that shape it.
Research and experimentation unfold as methods for sensing connections: between urban infrastructures and ancestral techniques, between digital logics and hand-based knowledge, between extraction and regeneration. In this practice, matter becomes both medium and agent — a participant in meaning rather than a passive resource. Her investigations consider how materials behave, transform, and remember, and how these behaviors mirror cultural and environmental patterns.
Gabriela’s understanding of place is shaped by layered geographies and intersecting knowledge systems. Born in São Paulo to a Bahian mother and an indigenist father who worked closely with communities in the Xingu, her sense of territory extends beyond national borders to include shared practices of making, caring, and inhabiting land. These crossings continue to inform her work as it unfolds across Brazil and Brooklyn, engaging landscapes, cultural memory, and contemporary urban conditions.
Gabriela graduated in Architecture and Urban Design in 2016 and co-founded Flipê Arquitetura, a studio recognized for its experimental approach to space and materiality, earning her a Forbes Under 30 Brazil nomination in 2022. In 2024, she founded Mest, an interdisciplinary, research-based Design practice in New York dedicated to exploring how systems of material, cultural, and ecological relations shape lived experience.
This in-betweenness of places and disciplines has shaped an identity and a practice that are not fixed points on a map but cartographies of relation. These crossings ground her work in a broader exploration, where design becomes a form of listening and response — a way of imagining how the contemporary world might be remapped through careful attention to what is already living, already in motion.