Anna was born in Brasília and raised in Campinas, Brazil. Her passion for politics and change led her to spearhead the creation of the first student council at her secondary school, called 'A Matter of Attitude' ('Questão de Atitude'), which campaigned for a school library, windows, and bins in classrooms, and she was elected as the Cultural Officer. She trained as an economist at the State University of Campinas (Unicamp) and gained extensive corporate experience working in Finance Controlling in R&D in telecom, first as an analyst and later as the head of the Controlling department. Pursuing and combining her various passions, she took a break between these positions to live in London and study fashion design and marketing at Central Saint Martins, focusing on ballet costume design.

As a repatriated Italian, Anna moved to Italy on sabbatical to meet family and visit the place where her WWI refugee grandmother lived before migrating to Brazil. She then relocated to London, where she shifted her financial skills to work in banking in the City of London as an analyst and later as a project manager. She also engaged in campaigns to help refugees in Calais and volunteered in various artistic projects at the Secret Cinema and the Old Vic Tunnels, the independent art venue arm of the Old Vic Theatre beneath Waterloo station, which no longer exists, where she acted, joined film crews, and worked on set and costume creation, among other activities. She learned to row on the Thames at the Barnes Bridge rowing club, and her passion for rowing continues today. She previously rowed for her Cambridge University college, Murray Edwards, elected Alumnae Officer of the college's rowing committee, and currently focuses on leisure rowing at the Cambridge 99s town club.

Anna left her corporate career in London when her children were born, aiming to fully experience being a full-time mother. She engaged in volunteering activities at her children's state schools, such as paired reading and serving as a parent representative. When her youngest started school and the family relocated to Cambridge, she submitted a master’s proposal to the University of Cambridge and was accepted into the programme at the Centre of Latin American Studies and Murray Edwards College, where she was supervised by Dr. Pedro Mendes Loureiro. There, she began reinventing herself in her 40s, pursuing meaningful topics related to her own lived experiences as a woman immigrant and mature student-parent—among other identities—advocating for children's dignity, strong public schools, belonging in higher education, inclusive feminism, social justice, anti-racism, and a less gendered world, among other LGBTQI+ issues. A vegetarian by choice since her early teenage years—when restaurants didn’t offer vegetarian options—Anna is also committed to creating a greener world and shares her home with a Labrador and a pair of cheeky ducks.

Aiming to give back to her home country a bit of what she received during her education at Cambridge University, after receiving a master's degree in Latin American Studies, Anna translated her master’s dissertation into Brazilian Portuguese and found a publisher in Brazil, where she published her first book in 2021 and is now available for free. Her study focuses on generational inequalities among mothers and daughters in Brazil, based on the lived experiences of daughters who were the first in their families to obtain a university degree in the early 2000s, and their mothers, who are or were paid domestic workers. Later, she also had her research published in English in the UK by Cambridge Scholars Publishing in 2023.

Still at Murray Edwards College at Cambridge University, Anna is now a PhD candidate at the Faculty of Education, supervised by Dr. Kathryn Moeller, and was awarded the Vice-Chancellor and Murray Edwards Scholarship via the Cambridge Trust. She continues to explore women's generational inequalities through the lenses of mothers’ and daughters’ life trajectories, comparing first-generation female university students from Brazil with those from England, and researching their sense of belonging as undergraduates attending public universities in the twenty-first century. Anna is also an engaged member of The Cambridge Latin American Research in Education Collective (CLAREC), where she enjoys bringing people together from different departments and beyond academia, leading initiatives that have resulted in events such as The Role of Education in the Fake News Era and The Cambridge Great Expectations Campaign for International Women’s Day, among others.