Eliana Mello holds a bachelor’s degree in conservation and restoration and a master’s degree in fine arts, and is currently a PhD candidate in the postgraduate programme for Architecture and Urban Planning of the Federal University of Bahia. She has spent the last ten years studying authored tile decorations in 20th century Brazilian architecture.

In 2015, during her master’s degree, she concluded the first Brazilian inventory fully dedicated to the artistic tiles produced in the country from the 1940s to the 1980s, and became part of the project Selaron Steps: pieces of the world, having coordinated the cataloguing of the almost five thousand tiles applied in the so-called Selaron Steps, located in the Lapa neighbourhood, in Rio de Janeiro.