Kamika’s Letters
Kamika thought she had to burn the letters from prison so she could move on. Instead, she turned them into community uplifting art. With poetry, screenwriting and spoken word, Kamika pushes past her family’s prison trauma, making something out of a lifetime of writing letters to prison.
This project took two years to complete from the original play to the opening screening. The film was accepted into the 2020 SF Black Film Festival, distributed by NowThis and screened at the 2020 Justice Panel, the first presidential debate hosted at a federal penitentiary.
The film shines a light on intergenerational incarceration in the Black communty, while sharing a message of hope for those people who grow up in the same system that Kamika was born into.
Creatives for Kitchens
Creatives for Kitchens is a charitable initiative that connects volunteer creative professionals with restaurants affected by the Covid-19 lockdown. The focus is on pro-bono support for light touch updates to items such as menus, copy, signage, and websites.
https://www.creativesforkitchens.org/
PerifaLions
Last year, I was invited to speak to students of a university in the “Periferia” of São Paulo – in Brazil, Periferia are socially vulnerable areas far-away from business centers. When I naively tried to explain the importance of outside references to open our minds, a student said: “I’ve never left this neighborhood, imagine leaving the city”. Sometimes we jump so deeply in our own battles that we forget how other people face huge challenges, too. I was fighting sexism before realizing that the advertising industry is not only sexist, but extremely elitist, too. That day, I understood my own duty of using my white privileges and everything my career has allowed me to achieve to try to shorten the distance between the “periferia” students and the big agencies. This year, I officially launched PerifaLions (“Perifa” is short for Periferia), a personal-independent-non-profitable project with the mission of bringing students from the “periferias” into the advertising market, by offering mentorships, training programs and a creative contest which the award is an all-inclusive ticket to Cannes Lions Festival plus an internship position in a big agency.
Stay At Home Out Of Home
At the very beginning of the pandemic, folks in Boston were not fully getting the message to stay inside. While their numbers kept rising, we decided to reach out to our media buying friends to see who had free digital billboard space in the area. Within a week, we wrote, designed, and shipped these boards and had them live in Boston. This was not cringey agency self promotion, we didn’t even post about it on social. It was just to feel like we were doing something about a hopeless situation.
In Spain There Is No Racism
Spain is different, we all know that. So when the #BlackLivesMatter movement started to kick in in our country all we could hear was “In Spain There Is No Racism” and we were mad.
Wavering Stripes
Wavering Stripes is an interactive website about immigration detention in the United States.
Hecho En Co.
Hecho En is a printed magazine and blog dedicated to showcasing and empowering Hispanic and Latino creators of all kinds.
Edison Street Mural
Every street has a racist past that never ended. Together with my neighbors, I painted a 336-foot mural that explores a history of systemic racism in one city, one street, one block—ours.
