Meet Bracy Tebbe-Trujillo

We’re excited to introduce you to the always interesting and insightful Bracy Tebbe-Trujillo. We hope you’ll enjoy our conversation with Bracy below.

Bracy, we’re thrilled to have you on our platform and we think there is so much folks can learn from you and your story. Something that matters deeply to us is living a life and leading a career filled with purpose and so let’s start by chatting about how you found your purpose.

I found my purpose through combining my creative photography skills with my love for storytelling and connecting with people. I used to be very anxious and stressed about understanding my purpose until I started creating what I genuinely loved. I can’t pinpoint it down to a specific moment but once I started shooting off my iPhone camera, I had this strong feeling that my purpose was to create moments of beauty that would move the deepest parts of people’s hearts. As I started to photograph people, I fell in love with the uniqueness of each story and the individual energy they brought. There’s so much joy in taking a person’s story and capturing its essence into a photograph. I see as taking something momentary and making timeless. It will always be an honor to capture the humans experiencing this thing we call life through my lens.

Thanks for sharing that. So, before we get any further into our conversation, can you tell our readers a bit about yourself and what you’re working on?

I was born in Texas but was raised in Peru with my mother’s family. My upbringing in Peru strongly influenced my worldview and made it difficult to integrate into American culture when we moved back in 2017. I graduated from Tyler Junior College with an associate’s degree in business last year and currently run my own window cleaning business, as well as lead Boathouse Ministry’s media team. Freelance photography and social media management are the side jobs that keep my creativity alive and have opened up opportunities to connect with clients on a deeper level. I absolutely love talking to clients, listening to their stories, and helping them bring their visions to life through photography or short-form video content. The heartbeat behind why I create is to give people a taste of the rare, simple beauty that awakens a hunger to ask why, and ultimately lead them to know God. Growing up in Peru opened my eyes to how broken our world is, how a little light can hold off great darkness, and that there’s so much beauty in imperfection. The fact that we get to interpret and share the human experience through photography and video is what ignites my creative spark.

There is so much advice out there about all the different skills and qualities folks need to develop in order to succeed in today’s highly competitive environment and often it can feel overwhelming. So, if we had to break it down to just the three that matter most, which three skills or qualities would you focus on?

Three things that have been essential to my creativity as an artist is being open-minded, seeking a wide variety of life experiences to draw inspiration from, and never being afraid to fail. Looking back, I did not fail enough. I should have taken more leaps into the unknown. Who knows what I could have created had I not let fear control my creative output? For creative photographers, I strongly urge you to study the great artists of your craft. Study what draws you toward their particular style, their lighting preferences, and what separates them from the rest. If you want to truly be great, spend time truly knowing yourself at a deeper level and how you perceive and feel the human experience. Learn to speak your own emotional language through photography because that’s what will ultimately move your audience. Personally, I feel like a failure if I haven’t emotionally awakened something within myself and my audience.

Before we go, maybe you can tell us a bit about your parents and what you feel was the most impactful thing they did for you?

Move me to Peru. I was very sheltered and had a narrow view of life and it’s rules before moving to Peru. Growing up in a country with extreme poverty, physically dangerous environment, and an entire generation of people traumatized from the Peruvian civil war that ended in the 90’s taught me to love people, to laugh at myself, and be grateful for everything I had. My parents taught me never to take anything for granted, to have compassio, and always create community. My love for storytelling came from sitting in my granmother’s smoky kitchen (she cooks with firewood) and listening to my family repeat decades worth of stories about feuds, ghosts, the civil war, and their childhood memories. My parents knew my childhood would be dangerous but raising me in a third world country has opened my eyes in the best way.

Contact Info:

• Website: https://bracytebbe.mypixieset.com/
• Instagram: @bracyelias