2026 BRAW Jury

Katia Canton is a writer, a psychoanalyst and a visual artist, currently living and working between São Paulo, Brazil, and Lisbon, Portugal. She previously studied art, dance and journalism in her hometown São Paulo, Brazil. She has lived in Paris in 1984, with a scholarship in Performance at Peter Goss school and in New York city, from 1987 to 1994. There she has earned a Master degree in Performance at Tisch School of the Arts and a PhD in Interdisciplinary Arts at Steindhart School of Visual Arts, both at New York University. Her academic and artistic research has consistently focused on Fairy tales and the Arts, from its origins in the oral tradition to contemporary productions (including her own work) that have constantly questioned the cultural construction of the concepts of the feminine and that of childhood through time. Since 1994, Katia Canton has been an Associate Professor of contemporary art at the University of São Paulo and from 2015 to 2019, she was vice-director at the Museum of Contemporary Art at USP. From 2019, she has also been working as a visiting researcher at the CLEPUL center, School of Literature, at the University of Lisbon, Portugal. As a curator, she has organized many exhibitions in Brazil and internationally.  Her academic research for the PhD was adapted and published as a book, The Fairy Tale Revisited, by Peter Lang Publishers, in 1994. After that she has published around 50 books, both in the genre of illustrated books and in contemporary art theory. She has won many of the most significant prizes in Brazil.  She returned to New York University in 2014 for a post-doc on the work of contemporary artists working with “subverting versions” of fairy tales, such as Pina Bausch, Paula Rego, Niki de Saint-Phalle and Kiki Smith. As an artist, Canton has participated in many exhibitions in Brazilian museums, contemporary institutes as well as appearing in international shows, art fairs and public art projects.

She studied Philosophy at the University of Milan, focusing particularly on the thought of Simone Weil, Nietzsche, Zen Buddhism, and the works of T.S. Eliot.

She has a partner and four children, an organic family farm, and a special connection with islands. As a family they divide their time between Ventotene, Venice, and Manhattan. In Venice, they opened the bookshop and bistro SULLALUNA in 2017, and in 2024 SULLALUNA NYC was born in the Greenwich Village. As a teenager, she began collecting illustrated books. Even as an adult, she has never stopped being drawn to images, the world of childhood, and poetry.

She served as president of the Argentine Association of Children’s and Youth Literature (ALIJA-IBBY) from 2019 to 2021 and has been a member of this national section since 2008. She was a juror for the Hans Christian Andersen International Award (IBBY) in 2016 and 2018, and for the Barco de Vapor-SM

Argentina Award in 2019. She is the editor of children's and youth works at Fondo de Cultura Económica de Argentina. She has worked as a school librarian for 30 years and was a university lecturer in Publishing (UBA). She designed and directed the Huellas collection at Tinta Fresca. She received the Pregonero Award for Specialist granted by the El Libro Foundation of Buenos Aires (2025). Education: Diploma in Childhood and Youth Narratives, Flacso (2018). Advanced Specialist in Children’s and Youth Literature, from the CePA-GCBA Postgraduate Program (2010). Editor degree in Publishing from Universidad de Buenos Aires (UBA) (2003). Promoter of Children’s and Youth Literature at the Banco del Libro in Venezuela (2007). National Painting Professor from the National School of Fine Arts Prilidiano Pueyrredón (1989).

Studio The Future / The Future Publishing was founded in 2013 by Klara van Duijkeren and Vincent Schipper, as a response to the increasing industrialization of publishing and the growing financial barriers faced by independent creators. As book production became increasingly mechanized and risk-averse, and as print-on-demand technologies were presented as a democratic alternative, they wanted to demonstrate that a more autonomous and craft-based form of publishing was possible. Working in small editions—typically between 50 and 200 copies—the studio maintains full control over every stage of production, emphasizing craft, quality, and independence. Because every aspect of production is handled in-house, each publication is approached individually: sometimes thread-bound, sometimes cold-glued—always with the conviction that a book should be able to physically withstand the test of time. Printing is done using primarily a Riso printer, ensuring a tactile, material, and sustainable approach to making. Over the past decade, Studio The Future has produced more than fifty publications, always in close collaboration with artists, designers, photographers, thinkers, and other makers. Each project begins from a shared process of dialogue and experimentation, exploring the book as a medium for exchange and reflection rather than mere documentation. Studio The Future creates artists’ books, critical readers, and hybrid formats that merge editorial design, research, and curatorial practice. Based in Amsterdam and with an active presence on Ojika Island (Japan), Studio The Future operates internationally, developing projects and collaborations across cultural, academic, and artistic contexts.