BYRAT = BY RABIA AND THIAGO
RABIA ALI
Rabia is a Texas native, with an ever growing passion for design. She co-founded this studio with Thiago in the pandemic of 2020 as a way to reach out to local businesses looking to brand themselves in an increasingly competitive online market.
Rabia moved to NYC in 2014 to further her education in the arts, specifically working to create sustainable spaces with social impact in areas working on development around the world. She holds a degree in Architectural Design from Parsons School of Design and briefly studied the technical side of this design from Harvard University Graduate School of Design. Through her education, she grew to love short-term architecture such as pop-ups and set design. This interest led her to interior design, where she spent about a year learning the ins and outs of the industry before taking the plunge and moving to Karachi to join the Design and Engineering team at Aga Khan University through IIP. Her sudden move back to the States allowed her to pivot back to her love for graphic design in the form of this expanding studio.
THIAGO LISBOA
Thiago was born and raised in São Paulo, Brazil. After graduating from High School he moved to New York to start his architectural career. By graduating with a Bachelor of Fine Arts in Architectural Design from Parsons School of Design he had the opportunity to develop his inventiveness through trials and errors, iterations and discoveries, but always with the rigorous education and quality that the University is known for. During his Junior Year, he studied abroad in Rome at the Pantheon Institute. It was a huge contribution not only to his studies, but also to the way he thinks and creates. It made him realize that architecture is way more than just buildings. It is also about preserving historical monuments while creating contrast between ages and periods. Moving ahead, he decided to pursue a Master of Architecture and aim for the architecture license. At the USC School of Architecture he has been able to get another perspective of the field with great potential to develop ideas, opportunities for new perspectives and different approaches to solve problems, and found his own design project StudioYBY.
With the COVID-19 pandemic of 2020, isolation, lack of space for creativity and a sense of uncertainty about the future made Thiago and Rabia get together and decide on solutions for all these issues on their own. BYRAT was founded as a means of helping them face this global issue and all its concequences and at the same time, it keeps them doing what they were trained for: design.