Luisa Dörr (1988) was born in Lajeado, Brazil. She remembers always carrying a camera with her since she was a kid, and after graduating from graphic design and gaining some experience in different cultural production companies, she finally found in photojournalism a way to understand other cultures and empathise with social problems.

We still remember Maysa with this blue dress and dark eyes dreaming of becoming Young Miss Brazil. What happened there was very discriminatory as she won the title of Young Miss São Paulo Black Beauty instead of the regular competition. In Luisa Dörr’s reflection about racism, we can’t help but think that despite being in 2020, we are still dealing with old social issues today. “Race, gender, culture or underrepresented communities. The stories are always the same. What makes the difference is your vision of it,” Luisa explains.

She knows how to combine historical themes with modernity, making a juxtaposition of modern Brazil and the transition from historic to pop culture in a completely new interpretation of other cultures – not only from Brazil but also from around the world, like this series of falleras valencianas of different ethnicities dressed in the typical folkloric costume.

Her work has been recently featured as part of the Latin American Photo Festival with a series about the growing wave of women participating in Brazilian cowboy culture, something they had been excluded from until now. This project works around the undergoing syncretic process of cultural assimilation between the North American cowboy culture and the Brazilian one, as she explains us in this conversation.