This month Samantha Almeida took the role of director of the Content Creation department of Globo Studios. One of the top female leaders in Brazil in innovation and diversity in the communication market, she heads the department responsible for encouraging the creation of entertainment content and manages the teams of writers, researchers and content producers of Globo.
In addition to all of her expertise in building plural storytelling, Samantha brings in her portfolio a trajectory marked by campaigns with a strong social resonance, focused on themes such as gender equity and racial debate, which earned her a series of awards and acknowledgements. She was the Brazilian judge in the Festival Cannes Lions in the Lions Entertainment Category and was just nominated to the 2021 Caboré Award in the innovation category.
She was also one of those honored in the 2020 Women to Watch and was elected by MIPAD, a UN and African Union-partner organization, one of the top 100 most influential African descendants under 40 on the planet, for her input in the Brazilian communication market.
‘I always had a great passion for building stories and a lot of respect for the people to whom I deliver them. My entire career, my world view, is about that: starting with an empathetic and honest look at people, their dreams, their fears, the beauty in the lives of regular people, like me. Building bridges, creating dialog between different realities. The opportunity of doing that in a plural country with so many stories such as Brazil is very challenging, especially when that is combined with the power and reach of a company like Globo’, indicated Samantha.
These stories, like everything else in communication, must keep up with the transforming times society is going through, where debate, collective creation and the multiplicity of voices are imperative. “Having lived the last decade working with digital storytelling, integrating creativity with data and performance, I have learned about the importance of listening for building. That applies to listening to the audience, to society, to the teams, partners”, she says, explaining she sees the diversity of experiences, references and thought is the sole possible starting point for innovation. ‘Diversity is not the answer to every problem in our market, but it is – without a doubt – our best opportunity of getting it right. New answers will necessarily come from new questions, and we need to be able to ask those questions. We know everybody that is missing around the tables where we are sitting and we have never missed that multiple knowledge so much’, she added.
‘At Globo, I fell in love with the universe of creation and communication. Because of my father, as a very young child, I walked through these sets, I could smell the studios, I watched shooting of programs from up close… That definitively impacted my imagination and left in me the wish to be part of this dream-making factory. Dreams of a young black girl, raised in the Rocinha community, daughter of an electrician’, concluded Almeida.
