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 seek to offer viewers a mirror of their own luminous beauty and divinity, an encounter with Joyful Liberation.
My Brazilian heritage pulses in color and rhythm, from samba to tropicalia, while radial forms evoke halos and wreaths, connecting the sacred to the everyday. Influences such as Mickalene Thomas’s fierce luminosity and Nafis White’s shrine-like wreaths resonate 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 experienced educator, I am committed to sharing these processes through teaching, mentorship, and collaborative making. With grant funding, I would expand my practice into larger assemblages and immersive embroidered installations, while also developing participatory works and community workshops that invite audiences into mirrored, haloed visions of themselves. Funding would support material research, public engagement, and pedagogical projects that extend my belief in art as a space for liberation, reflection, and collective joy.
