Eliana Ursine da Cunha Mello

 Following a bachelor's degre in Conservation and Restoration and a master's degree in Arts, in the subfield of Heritage Preservation, Eliana Mello is currently a PhD candidate in Architecture and Urban Design at the Federal University of Bahia, where she is a member of the research group NTPR, the Unit for Preservation and Restoration Technology.

She has spent the last ten years studying the use of artistic tiles in 20^th-century Brazilian achitecture, and has collaborated since 2015 with Az - Azulejo Research Network, which is part of ARTIS, the Art History Institute of the School of Arts and Humanities of the University of Lisbon. In 2015, while developing her master?s project, she concluded the first Brazilian inventory exclusively focused on artistic tiles produced in the country between the 1940s and the 1980s. In 2020, while working on the project "Selaron Steps: Pieces of the World", she coordinated the cataloguing of the almost five thousand tiles applied throughout the steps, located in the Lapa neighbourhood and classified as part of the cultural heritage of Rio de Janeiro.

She integrated in 2021 the managing body of ANTECIPA, the National Assocation for Research in Heritage Science and Technology, a civic group representing the institutions and members of the Brazilian scientific community working on the study and preservation of cultural heritage.