Ana Gaio

Ana Gaio is a Lecturer at the Department of Media, Culture and Creative Industries, City, University of London. Over her 25+ year career, she has directed the MA in Arts Management program and contributed to cultural policy research across global contexts. Her work focuses on decolonising cultural policy and management curricula through epistemic justice frameworks, particularly in postcolonial regions like Serbia, Puerto Rico, and South Africa.

• PhD in EU cultural policy formation
• Co-led £3m EU-Equal 'Celebrating Enterprise' project
• 2001 Creative Industries Mapping Document contributor

Her research interrogates power dynamics in knowledge production for cultural sectors, addressing:

• Decolonial pedagogies
• Epistemic violence in Western curricula
• Contextualised business models
• Localised cultural ecosystems

Recent publications examine pluriversality in knowledge systems and the cultural economy discourse in Latin American contexts. She advocates for positionality-aware teaching methods that embed student agency and recontextualise theoretical frameworks.