Zeuler Lima

Zeuler Rocha M. de A. Lima, Ph.D, CAU-BR, is an internationally accomplished designer, curator, educator, artist, scholar, and writer with interest in a humanistic approach to art and the built environment. He earned professional and research degrees as an architect, landscape architect, and urbanist from the University of São Paulo, with postdoctoral education in comparative literature from Columbia University. 

Lima teaches design studios and history-theory courses in the Sam Fox School of Design & Visual Arts, including the architecture study abroad program and the cross-disciplinary course Urban Books. He has taught and conducted research at the University of São Paulo, Brazil, the schools of architecture in Grenoble and Saint-Étienne, France, the University of Michigan, Columbia University’s Center for Comparative Literature and Society, and Hosei University School of Architecture, Tokyo, Japan. 

Between 1989 and 1996, Lima was one of the four partners of Projeto Paulista de Arquitetura office in São Paulo and won several distinguished national architecture, landscape architecture, and urban design competitions and awards in Brazil, including for the Federal District Legislative Assembly building on the Monumental Axis in Brasília (2010). His projects have been featured in several Brazilian publications, including in cover articles for AU and Projeto magazines. 

Lima received the prestigious 2007 International Bruno Zevi Prize for architecture history and criticism. His prolific historic and theoretical research and publishing focus on modernity and post-WWII architecture and urbanism. His dissertation “The City as Spectacle: The Architect and the Crisis of Contemporary Culture” (USP, 2000) focuses on architecture and global cities. He also received several national and international research grants and has contributed extensively to national and international journals, museum catalogues, and book editions. 

As the world expert on Italian-born Brazilian architect Lina Bo Bardi, recipient of the Special Golden Lion for Lifetime Achievement in memoriam, Lima has authored several books on her life and works in English, Italian, Portuguese, French, Spanish, and Catalan. His books include the acclaimed monograph “Lina Bo Bardi” (Yale University Press, 2013), “Lina Bo Bardi, Drawings” (Princeton University Press, 2018) biography “La Dea Stanca: Vita di Lina Bo Bardi” (Johan & Levi, Milan, 2021 and Companhia das Letras, São Paulo, 2021) along with exhibition catalogues. Lima has delivered several lectures worldwide and received deferential reviews, including in the New York Review of Books for his writings on Lina Bo Bardi. 

Since 2021, he has been working with Maria Farinha Film Productions (São Paulo) as associate producer on a fiction film based on his biography about Lina Bo Bardi. In 2014, he wrote, directed, and produced the video “Lina Bo Bardi, Curator.” Between 2017 and 2019, Lima served as guest curator in three chief exhibitions on Lina Bo Bardi’s works and drawings for the Palm Springs Art Museum (Palm Springs, Calif.), the Joan Miró Foundation (Barcelona) and the Carnegie Museum of Art (Pittsburgh, Pa.), each with a corresponding catalogue. He has also served on several curatorial advisory committees, including New York’s Museum of Modern Art, São Paulo’s Museu da Casa Brasileira, the Los Angeles County Museum of Art, Munich’s Architekturmuseum, and Zurich’s Johann Jacobs Museum. 

Lima is a multi-faceted and prolific artist, designer, and intellectual. He practices drawing, painting, printmaking, and bookmaking and has participated in several exhibitions, including the traveling solo exhibitions “The Architecture of Drawing” (São Paulo and Florence) and “Becoming Drawing” (Rome, Tokyo, St. Louis, Florence). He plays the piano and the cello. Since 2021, he is an academic candidate at the Saint Louis Psychoanalytic Institute. He is also a polyglot, fluent in English, Portuguese, French, Italian, and Spanish, with good knowledge of German, and basic knowledge of Japanese.