Where I come from

I grew up in a rural settlement in Santa Quitéria, in the interior of Ceará, Brazil, the third of six children in a family of farmers. Until I was eight, we had no electricity. A few minutes before the school bus came, I would go to my neighbor's house and watch whatever was on his TV, a window into worlds beyond the one I lived in.

One of those mornings took me to Javé, the village in the Brazilian film The Storytellers: told that a dam would flood their community, its residents decided to write down its history to save it. Like Javé, we lived under the shadow of a proposed uranium mine. For most of my childhood the road to school flooded every rainy season, and I missed exams because the bus could not get through. I had a great many questions, and the answers were almost never within reach.

So I trained as a journalist at the Federal University of Ceará, the first in my family to go to college, and spent the next years covering education, youth policy and social impact: a newsroom of public school students, campaigns that reached 350,000 teenagers, a youth team that covered the G20.

And then I stopped being satisfied with the frame. A photograph of a burned house is evidence. A volumetric scan of that house is a place you can still stand inside a year after it is gone.

My thesis film was about wind: the Cumbe Quilombo, in Aracati, a community whose land was handed to a wind farm nobody asked them about. Children of the Wind became one of three features chosen by Cine Ceará from more than a hundred.

A 360° recording of a Quilombola community living beside a wind farm does something a written report cannot: it refuses to let you look away from the scale of it.

I work on environmental justice, inclusion and public education, mostly alongside communities in the Global South, with them, not about them. The technology is never the point. Proximity is.

Every tool I reach for, from Gaussian splatting to a vertical video that finds a hundred thousand teenagers on their phones, gets chosen by one measure: how close does this put you to someone else's life before you stop being an audience and start being a witness?

In August 2025 I moved to Los Angeles for a master's in Narrative and Emerging Media at Arizona State University's California Center, supervised by Prof. Nonny de la Peña. Fall 2026 is my last semester.

There the documentary went spatial: volumetric scans of homes burned in the Eaton fire for Out of the Ashes, an LED volume, Gaussian splats, and a room-scale VR documentary about Boca Chica, where the rocket meets the beach. In the same year I helped take Reality Looks Back to SXSW, guided more than 6,000 visitors through SIGGRAPH's Immersive Pavilion and covered Venice Immersive for ASU.

In 2026 the work left the classroom. At SXSW I was associate producer and docent of Reality Looks Back, a volumetric documentary picked as 1 of 13 Spotlight projects out of 31, with 400+ individual viewings in five days. At SIGGRAPH I kept a real-time motion-capture dance installation running for four days and guided 6,000+ visitors through it.

Over the summer ASU picked me to cover Venice Immersive as digital media producer: 12 days shooting, cutting and publishing from the Lido, while Out of the Ashes, the immersive film on the Los Angeles fires whose behind-the-scenes documentaries I directed and edited, premiered in competition. In between, I managed a pilot that put 10 XR titles in five Los Angeles public library branches, and went through USC Annenberg's Content Creators Academy.

The question running through all of it is the one from the flooded road: how can communities facing environmental injustice in the Global South use immersive media to build resilience and inform public policy? Cumbe, in Ceará, and Boca Chica, in Texas, are different places with the same structure: someone decides that ground is worth less than somebody else's progress.

The Sound of a Sacrifice Zone, my master's capstone, is the first chapter of that agenda: a room-scale VR documentary on a border community resisting erasure where SpaceX's Starship program meets the coast. Prototype in December 2026, full production through 2028.