Ana María Durán Calisto is a designer and urban planner from Quito, Ecuador. In 2002, she co-founded Estudio A0 with her husband, British-Punjabi architect Jaskran Kalirai. Estudio A0 has designed a diverse array of multi-scalar projects in close collaboration with clients and community partners. Its building QPH obtained the first Leed Gold certification in continental Ecuador and was ranked 8th among the 500 best socio-environmental projects in Latin America at the 2015 Latin American Green Awards. In collaboration with Del Hierro AU and L + A Arquitectos, the studio won the competition for the Ikiam University campus, whose design was awarded First Prize in the SDSN Amazonia Infrastructure Award, at COP 21 in Paris. Its incremental housing scheme received Second Prize in a Social Housing Competition sponsored by UN Habitat. Estudio A0´s exhibition “Surfacing - The Civilised Agroecological Forests of Amazonia,” co-created with Omere, was featured in the 18th International Architecture Exhibition of the Venice Biennale “The Laboratory of the Future” (2023). A new co-produced iteration of it will be exhibited in a83 gallery in New York (2025), thanks to a Graham Foundation grant, and it will be presented at the Centro Cultural Metropolitano of Quito in 2026. The studio´s work has also been featured in the XX Chilean Architecture and Urbanism Biennial (2017).

Durán Calisto has taught research seminars and design studios at the Catholic University of Ecuador, Harvard, Pratt, Columbia, the University of Michigan, IAAC, the Catholic University of Temuco, and UCLA. In 2022, she received the Mark Cousins Theory Award for over two decades of work on extractivism and the built environment in Amazonia and her interest in the principles of ancestral and living Indigenous urban agroecologies and settlement systems. In 2010 she received a Loeb Fellowship from the Harvard GSD for her proposal to weave a South American network devoted to critically and creatively addressing the infrastructural integration of South America. In 2024 she was granted a Yale University Public Voices Fellowship. She is a member of the Science Panel for the Amazon, convened by SDSN & the UN. She co-authored its report´s chapter on urbanization and its policy brief on the challenges posed by infrastructure in the region. In 2015, she was the academic advisor to the Ecuadorian Minister on Housing and Urban Development for the UN Conference Habitat III. She collaborates as a consultant with CAF’s program on BiodiverCities and IDB´s Amazonia Forever program. In 2006 she was the Executive Director and curator of the XV Quito Pan-American Architecture Biennial: Visible Cities. She has been a member of diverse scientific committees, most recently for the II International Symposium Cities for Life in Amazonia (2024), and a member of the international jury in the Iberian American Architecture and Urbanism Biennale (BIAU 2024).

Durán Calisto has co-edited the books Ecological Urbanism in Latin America (2019), Beyond Petropolis: Designing a Practical Utopia in Nueva Loja (2015), and IV Taller Internacional de Vivienda Popular (2007). She co-authored Toward re-entanglement: A Charter for the City and the Earth (Bauhaus Earth, 2022). In 2010 she published her first poetry book, Cuerpojo Azul. She has lectured extensively and actively publishes in magazines such as Domus, Log, Mold, The Architectural Review, Harvard Design Magazine, Casabella, Arquine, GTA papers, Pangea, Manifest, Rivista Territorio, Ness, Revista Cardinalis, Rita, LatinArt Magazine, Revista 30-60, Revista Plot, Revista Radar, Trama, GAM, Aula, and Deco Journal. She is a Ph.D. candidate in the urban planning department at UCLA. Under the advice of Susanna Hecht, she is writing a dissertation on the urban history of Amazonia, with a focus on indigenous systems of territorial planning and colonial disruptions.