Alexandra Cosima Budabin studied art history, history, social thought and humanities at Harvard University and New York University. Her undergraduate thesis looked at Holocaust commemoration in Berlin and her Master’s thesis explored refugees through the lens of global citizenship. She held the Leon Milman Memorial Fellowship at the Center for Advanced Holocaust Studies, United States Holocaust Memorial Museum, Washington, DC. She received her doctorate in Politics from the New School for Social Research in 2012. She is a Senior Researcher at the Human Rights Center of the University of Dayton, has been research assistant (AR, unibz) for the Platform Cultural Heritage and Cultural Production from 2020 to 2023 and is now Senior Researcher at the Institute of Minority Rights at EURAC. Her research on gender security, human rights, humanitarianism and development has appeared in World Development, Perspectives on Politics, New Political Science, Human Rights Quarterly, Journal of Human Rights, Humanity, and Third World Quarterly. Her first book Batman Saves the Congo: How Celebrities Disrupt the Politics of Development with Lisa A. Richey was published in 2021 with University of Minnesota Press.

Gaia Piccarolo (1980) is an architect and architectural historian. She received her PhD in History of Architecture and Urban Planning at Politecnico di Torino with a thesis on Lucio Costa’s public commissions under Vargas’ Brazil from 1930 to 1945. Since 2010 she is Adjunct Professor of History of Contemporary Architecture, Urban Planning and Landscape Design at Politecnico di Milano. Since 2013 she has been a member of the editorial board of the architectural magazine Lotus International. She received the habilitation as Associate Professor in Restoration and History of Architecture (sector 08/E2). She has curated and participated in the curatorship of several exhibitions. Dr. Piccarolo has published extensively on contemporary architecture, urban planning and landscape design, with special reference to Brazilian modernism and the circulation of ideas and models between Europe and the Americas. Recently, she has been investigating the disciplinary encroachments between architecture, art and landscape in contemporary debates. Her research has been presented at international seminars and conferences in Europe, the United States, Canada and Brazil. She is author of the books Architecture as Civil Commitment. Lucio Costa’s Modernist Project for Brazil (Routledge, 2020) and Un progetto di mediazione. Lucio Costa fra tutela del patrimonio e nuova architettura (Maggioli, 2014). As co-curator with Nina Bassoli, she wrote the exhibition catalogues Architecture as Art. Mostrare l’architettura / Exhibiting Architecture (Editoriale Lotus, 2016) and City after the City (Electa, 2016).