In 2016, I wrote and directed a musical performed for a daily crowd of 50,000 people at a rock festival in Lisbon, Portugal. We opened the stage for Bruce Springsteen, Queen, Maroon 5, and other pretty amazing headliners.  It was the craziest thing I'd ever done and I had never felt more accomplished. But as I was watching the last performance, I felt something was missing. Not on stage, but in my life.

Back in Brazil, my homeland, I built a solid career as a writer: 17 plays, two blockbuster movies, five musicals, the Brazilian version of Ugly Betty, and the most prestigious theater award in the country. But I was also born into a very conservative family in one of the most homophobic countries in the world. Oh, and I'm queer AF.

So in 2017, I left everything behind to start from scratch in NYC not knowing a single person in the US. I started out by teaching musical theatre for kids in the Bronx. Then I wrote, directed and produced my first American play, “The Ideal Obituary” (The Tank, 2018) which was featured in Time Out. After that, I wrote and produced another play, “Real” (The Tank, 2019) featured in American Theatre Magazine.

Because of that play, I was invited to write for Blue Sky Studios (Fox Animation) where I worked as an in-house writer for 2 years and today I'm proud to say that I'm the first Brazilian person to write an animated feature for Disney, currently in production. I was also the head writer of the live-action series “How to be a Carioca” (Hulu 2023 ) and I'm now developing an animated series for Disney Plus.

Yes, I am listing all these accomplishments because, let's face it, this is my professional bio and I want to impress my reader. But the takeaway from the journey to becoming a writer in the US is that it forced me to embrace my Latin American identity as an artist and my queerness as a person. I learned how to tell a completely different story about who I am, healing relationships and (finally) living a life that I love.  Now, I want to help others do the sam through the power of storytelling.

I created an open-access Writers Club to support professional and aspiring writers and I periodically give e a free talk called “Storysharing” where I explain my process of turning personal experiences into fictional stories inspired by the concept of human shadow by Carl Jung (email below if you're interested in joining one of those.)

In the meantime, I keep writing. And spreading the word: storytelling is a lifeline, kindness is a weapon and queerness is a superpower.

Thanks for reading :)