Artist Statement

Being bicultural—Brazilian and American—shapes my creative practice. My art reflects the ongoing effort to reconcile this layered identity. The tension between belonging to two cultural spaces and navigating the shattering femininities of Western societies—where both cultures impose rigid gender expectations—continually challenges my sense of self. By embracing this fragmentation, I seek healing through art, transforming fractures into sites of beauty and offering others a vision of their own wholeness amid complexity.

I work in mixed media assemblage and embroidery, embracing craft-based processes to honor femininity, ritual, and joy. My practice revels in riotous textures, rhinestones, fabrics, and ornamentation—works that are decadent, radiant, and unapologetically feminine. I invite viewers into mirrored encounters with their own luminous beauty and divinity, an experience I call Joyful Liberation. My Brazilian heritage pulses through color and rhythm, from samba to tropicalia, while radial forms evoke halos and wreaths, bridging the sacred and the everyday.

The idea of theorizing joy animates my work across visual art and poetry: How does one construct joy in the hegemon? How do we carry hegemonic values in our bodies, and how can we unwind ourselves from these postures? Through collage, assemblage, and embroidered poetry, I explore the complexities of femininity within this context—balancing wholeness and fragmentation, and challenging hierarchies between art and craft. Influences such as Mickalene Thomas’s fierce luminosity and Nafis White’s shrine-like wreaths echo in my Ordinary Saints, small meditations on suffering and devotion, and in Superbacana, which frames the viewer as superhero, haloed in light. Recent embroidered works entwine erotic micropoems with sacred imagery, reclaiming woman-centered eroticism as transformative and divine.

As an educator, I am deeply committed to sharing these processes through teaching, mentorship, and collaborative making. With support, I aim to expand my practice into larger assemblages and immersive embroidered installations, while developing participatory projects and community workshops that invite audiences into mirrored, haloed visions of themselves. My work continues to affirm art as a space for liberation, reflection, and collective joy.

Bio