BIOGRAPHY

Antonieta Jacinto was a Luso-Angolan architect and urban planner who was born in Kahala, Huambo province, in 1930, and died in Lisbon in 2021. She completed her high school studies in Luanda, at the former Liceu Nacional Salvador Correia in 1948, and graduated from the Lisbon School of Fine Arts in 1956. Between 1953 and 1956, she undertook her practical training with the architect Alberto Manuel Barbosa Pereira da Cruz. According to the current State of the Art, she was the first woman born in Angola to become an architect. At the end of the 1950s, she returned to Angola, working on housing projects for African communities (Bairro dos Pescadores de Cacuaco, 1958) and equipping them with school programmes (Escola do Bairro Indígena, Luanda, 1958). Around this time, she designed her most famous project, in co-authorship with her husband, the architect Francisco Silva Dias: a high school for the former village of Henrique de Carvalho (now Saurimo, Lunda Sul) in the border area of northern Angola. The building is now considered a landmark of modern architectural culture in Africa. She drew up several urban plans before Angola's independence for places like Porto Alexandre and Baía dos Tigres, both in 1958. There are no other known projects for the African continent after she left Angola in 1960, before the events that triggered the start of the colonial war that marked the beginning of the conflict for the liberation of that formerly colonised territory.

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(Ana Vaz Milheiro, 2021; updated 2024)