The Cloudy Thoughts pavilion seen from below, cork-and-moss canopy against the sky at MuBE

Interior view of the Cloudy Thoughts structure, timber beams and living cork clouds overhead

The tilted white cube of Cloudy Thoughts crowned with moss-covered cork forms

Mirelle Martins and Shamel Pitts entwined in bronze body paint on a black stage in BLACK VELVET

Mirelle Martins and Shamel Pitts lying head to head in silver body paint on a black stage in BLACK VELVET

In Void — a suspended cloud of stacked white paper sheets filling a darkened gallery, lit through haze

In Void — layered white paper forms spilling across a darkened gallery floor

In Void — a visitor moving through the suspended paper landscape in low light

Mirelle Martins

Creative Director | Storyteller | Artist

Cloudy Thoughts

Adam Kalinowski — MuBE, São Paulo, 2013

01 — Biography

About

Portrait of Mirelle Martins during a light test in New York City, 2026, photographed by Itai Zwecker

New York City — 2026 — photo by Itai Zwecker ↗

Mirelle Martins began her career at the dawn of the creator economy, in 2003, as copywriter and video producer. Originally from Brazil, she received her Bachelor Degree in Social Communications from UnB (2002–06), 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, non-profit 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. Since 2015, she has been producing Gaga courses yearly in Brazil, so far reaching over 1200 students. 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.

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“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 ↗

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. Images courtesy of the artist's archive at cargocollective.com/mirelle and shamelpitts.com/blackvelvet.