Thalita Duarte

Communications Specialist

thalita@irisbh.com.br

Communications Specialist at IRIS — Institute for Reference on Internet and Society. Holds a bachelor’s degree in Social Communication — Advertising from Belas Artes de São Paulo and a specialization in Brand Strategy and Planning from Miami Ad School/ESPM, and is currently pursuing a professional master’s degree in Digital Communication and Data Culture at FGV (ECMI), as a full scholarship recipient of Fundação Itaú and Aberje.

With over 15 years of experience in strategic communications, she worked as a brand strategist at Twitter Brazil’s hub for innovation, creation, strategy, and technology, leading brand positioning and institutional communications for major brands, NGOs, and government institutions across Brazil and Latin America. There, she founded and led Blackbirds Brasil, the company’s first racial affinity group in the region. At Google, she worked as Creative Effectiveness Lead, and at YouTube Brazil as interim social media manager. Holds additional training in Theory U from the Presencing Institute (Cambridge, USA) and in biocentric governance from Schumacher College (Devon, United Kingdom).

In 2024, she founded Aquilombar, a regenerative and anti-racist communications consultancy working with Quilombola, Indigenous, and riverine communities in Brazil, selected for the EMMIE Erasmus Mundus program in Positive Impact and Regenerative Entrepreneurship. She was a monthly columnist for Meio & Mensagem and ProXXIma, is co-author of Essas Mulheres Sustentáveis Vol. 4 (2025) and Aquelas Cartas (Editora Zouk, 2020), and was recognized by Forbes Brasil as a Top 10 Black Innovator in Tech and by Meio & Mensagem as 30 Under 30.

At IRIS, she leads the institute’s institutional and strategic communications, building the processes, infrastructure, and editorial and creative direction of the area to make digital rights, platform regulation, data governance, and artificial intelligence agendas accessible.