Two things were always clear: I needed to make things. And I needed to make the world better.
Childhood
The kid with the posters.
I was twelve when I won first place in an adult sand sculpture competition.
I was also the kid who bicycled around the neighborhood handing out hand-drawn posters about saving the environment. Who tried to negotiate with ants rather than let my parents kill them with pesticides.
Growing up
Someone else’s life.
As a teenager, I convinced myself art wasn’t practical. So I studied marketing, built a career, and spent years feeling like I was living someone else’s life.
But life had other plans. It dragged me back to what I loved.
New York · London
Everything I thought I wanted.
New York. The Art Students League. Then London: exhibitions, recognition, all the things I thought I wanted.
I got them. And felt empty anyway.
Brazil
The temple.
So I walked away. I returned to Brazil and spent four years as a resident artist at a Buddhist temple and a volunteer at a meditation school. No galleries. No ambition. Long silences. I learned what it actually means to make something for reasons other than being seen.
Those four years changed everything. Not because I found peace, but because I found out what I was actually for.
The mountains
A life that refused to stay in one place.
Isolation in the Brazilian mountains. Then motherhood, and a move back to the city to be closer to my family. Murals to pay the bills.
South Carolina
A gallery of my own.
Love took me back to the United States. In South Carolina, I became a gallery co-owner and the first artist in the Mount Pleasant Town Hall art program.
It was there that I created Like A Girl: Dare To Dream, two years of work and forty portraits of women, shown in a solo museum exhibition in Charleston.
Web3
Love. Loss. And a new path.
Then came loss, and a fresh start. In 2021 I started selling NFTs, and a whole new path opened.
I founded the NFT Painters movement, led communities, helped launch a blockchain for art and spoke at NFT.NYC three years in a row. Along the way, I became known as a collector and curator too. See the NFT story.
Now · Itupeva
Back to the canvas.
I’m back in Brazil now, building a studio in Itupeva, São Paulo. Returning to paint, texture, canvas, presence.
Twenty-five years in, I’m still driven by the same two things that moved that twelve-year-old: making something meaningful, and leaving the world a little better than I found it.
Some things don’t change. Most things do.
What I believe
Using art as a voice for the greater good.
I see a painting as a portal. It can bring peace to a restless mind, or move someone who has been standing still for too long. Sometimes it opens a conversation that is hard to start any other way.
That is why so much of my work is tied to causes: the women who inspired Like A Girl, the bees and pollinators of The Hive, the reforestation project that Saudade helped fund in Brazil. Art is how I take part.