Rita Castel-Branco, with Spanish-Portuguese roots, grew up immersed in an art and fashion family - from a very young age photographing editorials, building sets, and developing concepts during world travels with her mum and uncle.
Based between Paris and Lisbon, her images operate as suspended moments: not illustrations of events, but their residue - a gesture interrupted, a space abandoned, a presence fading. Drawing on Lynch, Sofia Coppola, and Eggleston, she works in the tension between raw and polished, nostalgic and hypermodern, dissolving reality and fiction, the divine and the everyday.
Castel-Branco reflects on how images organize memory, desire, and feeling - where memory is not an archive but a process, something rehearsed, edited, and continuously rewritten. She is drawn to identity, femininity, and self-reinvention, with a particular eye for misfits and the visually eccentric.
She studied filmmaking at New York Film Academy (2017) and thrives across fashion, fiction, documentary, and commercials.
Clients: Vogue, Fucking Young!, Vetements, Glamour, Netflix, Google, Xiaomi, Canon, Havana Club, Retrosuperfuture.
Exhibitions: The Missing Script (solo exhibition, ARTROOM Lisbon 2025); IMAGEnation (Paris Photo 2025); Artsis Collective Chroma Flora (2023); Amigos do Transpraia (2025); Splash (2018); Suspenso (2019).
