engagement / participation / dialogue
Hello
I design spaces for dialogue and discovery — where learning happens through curiosity, play, and shared imagination.
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With over a decade of experience across design studios, research groups, and educational institutions, I’ve led Living Labs, developed programs, and coached teams working on topics such as urban innovation, digital rights, and audience engagement. I bring a user-centered approach to each context, rooted in curiosity, iterative making, and dialogue.
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Whether guiding students, co-developing public toolkits, or exploring how researchers relate to their own insights, I create conditions for learning and transformation. My multicultural background and interdisciplinary path shape a practice that is both precise and playful — grounded in questioning, collaboration, and care.
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I am an engagement artist working between art, design, and education — creating spaces where participation becomes a way of thinking and feeling together. What interests me most is not the finished work, but the moment when imagination becomes shared — when people recognize themselves in each other’s ideas.
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Vanessa Catalano Studio emerges from this intention — a space for collaborative inquiry, where art, design, and research meet to explore new ways of engaging with the world.
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My Story
My story is one of movement — across cultures, disciplines, and ways of seeing — shaped by the understanding that discovery requires movement: of thought, of perspective, of self.
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I was born in Venezuela, a place layered with contrasts and stories. That early experience of cultural multiplicity shaped how I perceive the world — always from more than one angle, always aware of what is not immediately visible.
Architecture became my first language of expression: a way to give form to relationships between people and space. Later, my studies in Design Cultures deepened this perspective, revealing how every object, space, or image carries traces of collective meaning.
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Over the years, my practice has evolved through collaboration, research, and teaching. I have worked within universities, living labs, and public programs — environments where learning happens through making and exchange. I design participatory experiences that may take the form of a workshop, an installation, or a prototype, but always with the same intention: to open dialogue, to make room for reflection, and to invite others to co-create.
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Projects in which I've collaborated, such as EPIC-WE, an EU-funded collaboration exploring game-based learning and collective imagination, have allowed me to experiment with play as a way to connect different worlds — education, art, and research — through a shared sense of curiosity and care.
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Through all these explorations, my question remains the same:
How can we design the conditions for engagement — where imagination becomes a form of relation?
