Meet Alessandra Castro

We caught up with the brilliant and insightful Alessandra Castro a few weeks ago and have shared our conversation below.

Alessandra, so good to have you with us today. We’ve always been impressed with folks who have a very clear sense of purpose and so maybe we can jump right in and talk about how you found your purpose?

I’ve always been an obsesive creator since I got memory, i just loved to destroy stuff to create other stuff, could be clothing, crafts, paintings, random objects, anything, useful or not, I just liked to see how things worked, sounds like a cliche but my mom can confirm because most of the things I destroyed where in her closet haha

And that translated in a lot of exploring through all my adolescence, jumped into different careers to end up thinking that I was going to be an architect but life throwed advertisign in my face and I couldn’t just not fall in love with it, it was like the perfect balance of obsessive creating and curated creating,

So now that I’m a grown up creator, and I can look back and see how everything make sense and that my purpose in life was to create to comunicate my thoughts and mainly to help others comunicate their thoughts through my hability.

Let’s take a small detour – maybe you can share a bit about yourself before we dive back into some of the other questions we had for you?

I’m an art director with backround in copywriting, some architecture and a speciality in fixing things up, loving the world and the people, and loving fashion in all senses.

Based on my obsessive creation thing, by the age of 17, I wanted to be a million things, physicologist, sociologist, interior designer, graphic designer, musician, architect, so after 2 years of loosing time exploring that and having the most random jobs I finally decided to took two years of architrecture, It was the first time I was literally obssesed with something so much that my brain hyperfocused for two years straight, but still, I felt in my heart that something was missing.

So this is where the crazy things stared to happen.

Between those years of exploring I knew about an advertising school called that was in Argentina (by that time I had 0% idea of what is advertising and I just called that school a “creativity school” in general) so I remember that there was a time that I couldnt stop talking about it at school and how much I loved the work they do, etc.

But I was seeing that work as pure ideas, not as advertising ideas, so months pass by after that, forgot a lil bit about it, and guess what: the school decided to open in Honduras, exactly in the city I was living on, and whats better than that: they opened a scholarship subbmision, it was a competition of bad ideas and the winner of it had to have the WORST idea ever, and guess who won? ME hahahha

That was the moment that shifted my career forever, I left architecture for advertising, fell completly in love, I stared as a copywriter in my country and then when I came here I switched to Art Direction because Heather Vanisko the co-founder/director of Denver Ad School (the portfolio school im currently enrrolled in) saw a natural Art Director in me, and I looked back and realized that I do enjoy advertising, but I was suffering a lot doing copywriting, so I was like well, this is the time to know what I am about, and considering that I did architecture/ visual arts since forever, Is like I have some natural visual perspective on me.

So here I am, genuenly happy that I shifted my career, and so grateful for eveything and everyone that was part of the process that leaded me to this moment, I not only achieved more than I though I would by this early point of my career, which is not a lot but im happy for it (just won an award in the New Blood D&AD festival this year) and I’ve known a lot of interesting and great people, people with good minds and hearts that guide me through this life.

Who knows what I will end up doing at the end of my creative career (hope to be designing MET Gala dresses haha) but right now I’m happy with where I am, soon I’ll be launching my new portfolio that I’ve been working on with Denver Ad School, so stay tunned!!

If you had to pick three qualities that are most important to develop, which three would you say matter most?

Unfortunely I have only two but it has been a great combo for me to wake up everyday and get the best part of the day with it, and that is: honesty with everyone, but conviction with myself.
That means, be honest to the outside, if you know what you can offer don’t sell more than that, but at the same time have conviction in yourself that you can work to offer what you dream to be.
And that only can happen if you’re transparent with yourself and know what are you weak on and what are you strong on.
Is like a forever search for a balance between those two.

To close, maybe we can chat about your parents and what they did that was particularly impactful for you?

They never say no to creative activities, with money or not, we would always sort things out to do what my creative mind was craving, and I’ll always be thankful for it, because is a thing that gave me the freedom to be instead of trying ot find a box to fit in, but at the same time, it was about working on that exploration, it was not only doing the bare minimum, it was me going all in in whatever I wanted to do.

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