Susana Roxo Oliveira (Lisbon, 1976) is a PhD candidate in the Research Doctoral Program at Universidade Lusófona, Lisbon, and a doctoral research fellow funded by the Portuguese Foundation for Science and Technology (UI/BD/154916/2023), affiliated with the Centre for Interdisciplinary Studies in Education and Development (CeiED). With a background in design and visual arts education, she holds a Master’s degree in Visual Arts Teaching, a Postgraduate Diploma in Special Education, and a Bachelor’s degree in Design. Her doctoral research is situated in philosophy of education and examines the experience of being a teacher in the context of Curricular Autonomy and Flexibility in Portugal. Drawing on critical perspectives on modernity, world-centred education, the notion of pedagogical gesture, and an ecological understanding of teacher agency, the study explores teaching as an ethical, situated, and relational practice. Methodologically, the research adopts an arts-based approach, using photovoice and fragmentary writing as epistemological devices to engage with the lived experience of teachers beyond instrumental or prescriptive frameworks. Her broader research interests include epistemology, aesthetics, and artistic thinking, with particular attention to non-instrumental forms of knowing, attention and gesture, aesthetic experience, and self–world relations in education. Drawing on phenomenology and Japanese aesthetic philosophy, her work seeks to clarify the epistemological assumptions that inform educational inquiry and practice, without proposing methodological prescriptions. Alongside her doctoral research, Susana has participated in national and international academic and professional development programmes, including doctoral-level coursework in Visual Arts in Context and Being Human Today at the University of Agder (Norway), and the Summer School in European Education Studies (University of Strasbourg). She has also been involved in arts-based and interdisciplinary research contexts, including the design and facilitation of the exploratory workshop Gestures Across Difference within the Erasmus BIP programme (2025), and is a certified ambassador of the Eurodoc Programme for Values and Democracy in European Research and Higher Education.