Mariana Sanchez Salvador is a Portuguese architect and researcher at DINÂMIA'CET-IUL (ISCTE-IUL, Lisbon, PT). She worked as an architect at Carrilho da Graça Arquitectos studio, where she collaborated on numerous projects, from urban plans to public buildings, housing, refurbishments, and temporary installations. In the past years, her research has been focusing on how the spaces we inhabit — from the city to the house — are transformed by the food we eat and by food-related activities, operating as a spatial design tool.

She was awarded the Architect Quelhas dos Santos Prize for Best Masters Dissertation in Architecture (FAUL - Faculty of Architecture, University of Lisbon) in 2015, which was published in Portuguese under the title “Arquitectura e Comensalidade: uma história da casa através das práticas culinárias” (Caleidoscópio, 2016).

She is currently writing her PhD thesis in Urban Studies, about the evolution of the Foodscape of Lisbon, at FCSH-UNL and ISCTE-IUL, in Lisbon, and was awarded a PhD Fellowship by the Portuguese Foundation for Science and Technology (FCT). She currently teaches Food Systems at the Master in Food Design at Estoril Higher Institute for Tourism and Hotel Studies (ESHTE).

She is the author of several publications and has been invited as guest speaker at national and international conferences, open classes of Master and PhD in Architecture and PhD in Landscape Architecture (FAUL, ISCTE, UAL, ISA), public events, as well as interviews for national newspapers (Público, Expresso) and by Rádio TSF and Rádio Antecamara.

She participated in the 5th Istanbul Design Biennial Empathy Revisited: Designs for more than one, with the film As Above, so Below (co-directed with Rain Wu), and in the Tbilisi Architecture Biennial What do we have in common? (2020), with the text Food Common Spaces. Recently, her photographic piece 1851 days of research was part of the collective exhibition I Think I Made You Up, at Galeria Plato (Évora).