Born in Minas Gerais, Brazil, in 1983, Leonardo Carrato is a Brazilian photographer, filmmaker, documentarian, and educator based between Rio de Janeiro and São Paulo. His practice is centered on long-term projects concerned with territory, memory, the environment, social transformation, and ways of life.

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Since 2018, he has collaborated with The VII Foundation, where he completed the VII Mentor Program and, in 2024, became a contributing photographer. In this role, he has conceived, hosted, and written for the foundation’s public programs on Latin American photography, including conversations with Sebastião Salgado, Claudia Andujar, and Miguel Rio Branco. He also works as an educator, leading seminars on photojournalism, documentary photography, visual language, and long-form photographic practice, particularly with photographers from Latin America.

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His photographic practice began in 2013, when he co-founded the independent media collective Coletivo Carranca in Rio de Janeiro. During that period, he developed The Uprising, an insider’s account of the demonstrations that brought millions of people to the streets of Brazil, and Article 6, a two-year multimedia project documenting hundreds of families living in extreme poverty inside an abandoned public building near Maracanã stadium. Photographs from Article 6 were later used by the Public Defender’s Office as supporting documents in the process that relocated families to social housing.

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Since then, his work has increasingly developed through long-term research, repeated fieldwork, and sustained relationships with people and territories. Since 2015, he has been working on En Bora, a long-term project centered on the Bora shaman Aladino Mimico in the Peruvian Amazon and on the transformations affecting Indigenous cosmologies, knowledge, and ways of life.

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Between 2019 and 2024, Carrato developed Krenak Reformatory: Fragments of an Underground Memory, an investigation into an Indigenous prison created during Brazil’s military dictatorship and into the traces that this history continues to leave in the landscape and collective memory. The project received the Pierre Verger National Photography Award in 2023, and photographs from the series entered the collection of the Bibliothèque nationale de France in 2026. It is currently in an advanced stage of development as a photobook and is also being further examined through the 2027 ARCHIVO Research LAB Fellowship — Visualising Democracy: Archiving in Times of Political Change, within a collaborative environment of research, mentorship, and critical discussion around archives, memory, and political change.

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His current long-term project, The Promised River, follows the São Francisco River Diversion Project across Brazil’s semi-arid Northeast. Rather than approaching the infrastructure simply as a solution to water scarcity or as a symbol of its contradictions, the work investigates the space between promise and consequence: how the arrival of water alters landscapes, everyday practices, relationships, imaginaries, and the possibilities people perceive for remaining in and shaping their territories. Combining long-term fieldwork with historical and theoretical research, the project approaches the Diversion through questions of presence and absence, affect, subjectivity, and the forms of life that emerge around an infrastructure whose consequences are still unfolding.