Bruna Santos is the director of the Brazil Program at the Inter-American Dialogue. She previously led the Brazil Institute at the Woodrow Wilson Center for Scholars. Prior to that, she served as vice president and director of innovation at Brazil’s National School of Public Administration (Enap), the country’s premier government training institution. Earlier in her career, she was a director at Comunitas, a nonprofit organization founded in 2000 to promote social development in Brazil.

From 2010 to 2013, she lived and worked in Beijing, China, where she was a market analyst at Chinatex Grains & Oils and co‑founded Radar China, a public relations firm. Santos is a member of the global network of Eisenhower Fellows and has served as an adjunct professor at Columbia University’s EMPA Global. She was honored by Apolitical and the World Economic Forum’s Global Future Council on Agile Governance as one of the fifty most influential leaders championing innovation in policymaking.

Santos holds a master’s degree in public administration from Columbia University and a bachelor’s degree in international relations from the Federal University of Rio Grande do Sul. She was a program officer at the Columbia Global Centers in Rio de Janeiro. A native Portuguese speaker, she is fluent in English and Spanish and proficient in Mandarin.