Luiza De Moraes Email & Phone Number

It was my first day of school in the United States. I was seven and spoke zero English. I was put in normal classes instead of ESL. The entire day I didn't understand a single word. I was disconnected from the world around me. Teary-eyed I went to the front office and like E.T. mimed to “phone home” asking to leave. The answer was a solid no from my strong-headed Brazilian mother. Reading, the teacher told her, was the remedy that would allow me to catch up. Books became my way to connect to a foreign society. Books became survival. My love for stories deepened and became so serious it led me to a Bachelor’s Degree in Literature - in my second language. My life since then has been made up of sharp turns and windy roads. But there was always one common thread - my love for observing and witnessing life around me. Through screenwriting, filming, and directing, I found my way of exercising this love and capturing the essence of the stories that most intrigue me.For over ten years I've dedicated myself to visual storytelling. It all started through documenting surfing. That created a stepping stone into the role of director, story producer, filmmaker and director of photography. In 2016 I directed my first documentary series - Down the Pacific, a 15 episode series showing a journey from Alaska to Patagonia in search of adventures, culture and sports. In 2018 I directed a four part documentary series focused on gender inequality called #thefutureisfemale traveling from Brazil, Iceland and Pakistan showcasing the differences between the lives of women from each of those countries. In 2020, at the height of the pandemic, I directed a full-length documentary telling the history of Newsstands in Brazil – a small business going extinct - for Discovery Channel. That project ended up winning two Silver Lions in Cannes. My last documentary was Abdelmassih: From Miracle to Crime for Discovery+, a four part True Crime telling the story of a famous Brazilian fertility doctor who was sentenced to 278 years in prison for 52 rapes and 39 attempted sexual abuses on women. In 2018 I entered the world of advertising and since then have directed multiple campaigns for brands such as Dove, Gillette, AXE, Degree, Santander Bank and many others. My documentary style gave me the flexibility and creativity to exceed in the advertising world. My Brazilian background and American upbringing gave me keys that unlocked various dimensions. My brain has been split and fused back together with these two wildly different cultures creating a vision of the world that is uniquely mine.

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  San Diego State University

  English Language And Literature/Letters