Mirelle MartinsCreative Director | Storyteller | Artist
Mirelle Martins began her career at the dawn of the creator economy, in 2003, as copywriter and video producer. In 2006, she completed her Bachelor Degree (UnB — Universidade de Brasília) in Social Communications with a focus in storytelling for cinema, video, press, internet and new medias, and has worked as an artist, independent curator and art producer since 2010. Over the years, she anchored her work in a profound passion for digital media, live events, and deep expertise in orchestrating multichannel media strategies that elevate brand narratives, with a proven track record managing creative pipelines for multinational corporations, award-winning advertising and design agencies, nonprofit organizations, and international art institutions.
In 2013, Mirelle started to research her own artistic expression in performance art with the intensive summer course of Gaga.people.dancers in NYC. From 2013 to 2016, while living in São Paulo, she collaborated with the artists Anna Zêpa, Eveline Sin, Daniel Minchoni, Mauricio Pisani, Aaron Kawai among others in projects of video, photography, and site-specific live performance. Since 2015 until 2019, Mirelle was the producer and translator of Gaga.people.dancers movements language in Brazil. The classes were produced at Grupo Corpo, SPCD, Sesc and other places reaching over 1000 students in 3 major Brazilian cities: São Paulo, Rio de Janeiro, and Belo Horizonte. In 2016, at 32 years old, she made her dancing debut in “BLACK VELVET”, a duet by Shamel Pitts with light designer Lucca Del Carlo. The show toured in the US and internationally from 2017 to 2020, and received the Audience Choice Award at Stockholm Fringe Festival (Sweden, 2017) and Best out of Town Production by ArtsATL (Atlanta, 2018). The partnership with Pitts continued with “BLACK HOLE” (2018), where Mirelle collaborated as performer and costume designer. Since 2019, she has been one of the founding artists of TRIBE, a Brooklyn-based arts collective led by Pitts, where she also acts as Creative Director.
“…her softly commanding presence …, she resembles a statue brought to life”— On Mirelle Martins in BLACK VELVET, The New York Times ↗
“The work is like a fragment of nature — a glacier, a cloud, a rock — magnified in exaggerated proportions, bringing the visitor both familiarity and estrangement.”— Mirelle Martins, exhibition curator, quoted in Folha de S. Paulo ↗
“I have many influences, but science is a major one. Even before I decided to dance, about ten years ago, I found relief in studying the cosmos—the movement of energies, cohesion, the idea that time doesn't exist outside the planet. These ideas of energy and distant forces, and of being part of a cosmic dance, really shaped me.”— Mirelle Martins, quoted in Lampoon Magazine ↗
“Martins saves this somewhat heavy-handed piece with her outstanding performance.”— On Mirelle Martins, Der Standard ↗
“In Gaga, a lot is said about how our weakness can be our strength. This concept really helped me during the process; to believe that even with the lack of formal, technical training I had something to offer and to share. The process was to find this power inside me”— Mirelle Martins, quoted in Time Out ↗
02 — Archive
Visual Archive
Documentation from The Core and Cloudy Thoughts, MuBE — São Paulo, and from BLACK VELVET with Shamel Pitts, alongside In Void (2011). Photographs of Cloudy Thoughts and In Void by Adam Kalinowski. BLACK VELVET images courtesy of shamelpitts.com/blackvelvet and the AURA dance festival archive. Images from the artist's archive at cargocollective.com/mirelle, with video works from the artist's Vimeo and YouTube playing directly in the gallery.
Featured Media
04 — Elsewhere