There’s a certain kind of power that doesn’t announce itself. It shows up in the room before you do, shapes the conversation before a word is spoken, and leaves a mark long after you’ve left. Gilvana Viana has that kind of power. The kind that was built, not granted.
Throughout her career, Gilvana has taken on a strategic leadership role aimed at increasing Black representation in the music industry. The Chief Executive Officer and co-founder of Punks S/A, MugShot, and CASABLACK is genuinely devoted to something the advertising industry claims to value but rarely practices: putting culture at the center, not the margin. This year, she arrives at D&AD not as a juror, but as Jury President of the Sound Design and Use of Music jury — a seat she earned the same way she earns everything: one meaningful project at a time.
Space between notes
Ask Gilvana what excellence in sound design actually means to her, and she doesn’t give you the textbook reply. She gives you the honest one.
Good sound design, she says, deepens the experience of a story without the viewer ever consciously registering why.
“It creates atmosphere, tension, presence, and memory. Sometimes, it is precisely the sound detail that makes a scene impactful or sticks in someone’s mind,” Gilvana tells adobo Magazine in an exclusive interview. The benchmark isn’t technical precision or genre innovation. It’s whether the sound made you feel something you couldn’t quite explain.
What concerns her more than mediocre sound is the process behind it. Too often, music arrives at the end of production, layered over a finished edit after every critical creative decision has already been made. At MugShot, her creative studio specializing in creating soundtracks for brands and artists, this is treated as a fundamental failure. When sound enters the process early and the exchange is genuine, everything that follows becomes stronger. The work becomes more sensitive, more connected, more cognizant of its own emotion. Sound, in her view, is load-bearing, but the industry keeps treating it like furniture.
Gilvana has earned every right to extrapolate on sound design. Recognized for her leadership and impact in the fields of culture, music, and communication, Gilvana was nominated for the Potências 2025 Award, promoted by Billboard Brasil and produced by MYND, reinforcing her role as a transformative force in the creative industry.
She has garnered national and international recognition, including nine Lions at Cannes, and has participated in the Gerety Awards, Clio Awards, and the Portuguese-speaking Creativity Awards in Portugal, as well as the CICLOPE International Festival, CICLOPE Latino, and the highly competitive D&AD Awards, held in London, which recognize excellence in design, advertising, production, and craft.
In recent years, the executive has also served as a judge at events including the Cannes Lions Festival, Clube de Criação, CICLOPE Latino and Ciclope Berlin, Lisbon International Advertising, and this year she will chair the jury at the D&AD Festival.
Brazil is not one thing
If you want to understand Gilvana’s creative worldview, you have to appreciate how she sees Brazil. Not just as a country, but as a collision of sorts.
“You go to the North and find an aesthetic, a musicality, and a way of creating that is completely different from the South, the Northeast, or the Central-West,” Gilavana says. There is a shared sense of identity to being Brazilian, she explains, and there are layers most of the world has never bothered to unravel. A deeply Afro-diasporic culture, ancestral knowledge, indigenous traditions, and everything that emerged from complex, often violent encounters. This is the creative material she works with, and she knows its value precisely because the global industry has spent so long underestimating it.
She doesn’t soften her answer when asked why Brazilian and Latin American work remains underrepresented in global awards. It is, she says plainly, a consequence of colonization — the structural assumption that creativity produced in the Global South occupies a peripheral place in the world’s cultural hierarchy. Language is a factor, but a secondary one. The deeper issue is whose creative instincts the industry has historically been willing to take seriously.
Her work building the Mano a Mano podcast with Mano Brown — one of the founding and most culturally authoritative voices in Brazilian hip-hop — sharpened this conviction. Brands that reach for cultural credibility without cultural honesty always come up short. They want the artist’s audience without the artist’s voice, the association without the accountability.
“Brands need to trust artists more. The voice they’ve built, the relationship they have with their audience, and the message they convey. Because that’s precisely what makes everything so powerful.”
Nine Cannes Lions and an expanding slate of global jury appearances later, Gilvana still isn’t waiting for the industry to update its appreciation of geography.
What gets lost
Gilvana is not afraid of artificial intelligence. She is afraid of what happens when the industry uses it as an excuse to stop paying for human feeling.
AI can accelerate the process, assist with testing, and open new possibilities. But behind every prompt, there still needs to be someone with experience, sensitivity, and creative vision. The problem isn’t the tool, but the justification. When brands reach for AI-generated music to cut costs, the audience feels it — not intellectually, but viscerally. Something is missing: the specificity of a composer shaped by a particular city, a particular grief, a particular joy. Music accompanies people’s lives in deeply personal ways, and it is too important to be treated as a line item.
She sees the same logic reflected in the way the industry approaches representation. She doesn’t mince her words when sharing her views.
“Unfortunately, Brazil remains an extremely racist country — despite the fact that the majority of the population identifies as Black — and this has a direct impact on who is able to access opportunities, leadership roles, investment and decision-making power. We talk a lot about structural racism, but there is still a huge pay gap, a severe lack of access and a weakening of affirmative action policies within companies.”
The creative suburbs of Brazil, particularly among Black women, hold extraordinary talent that the industry systematically fails to reach. And she has felt that barrier personally.
“I have felt this many times throughout my career. On several occasions, it seemed as though there was already an invisible barrier dictating just how far we, as Black women, could go, lead or negotiate within this market,” Gilvana says. “And I think that is why today I also feel a huge responsibility to pave the way, create opportunities and bring other women along with me whenever possible.”
Progress has happened, and Gilvana is careful to say so. There have been more women in leadership, more conversations about diversity. But as women gain ground in numbers, the pay gap widens — and the distance from visibility to actual power remains vast. She names where the responsibility sits: with the people who already hold decision-making power, who still need to understand that real change requires them to act, not observe.
Both failures — the disposable music and the squandered talent — trace back to the same instinct: choosing what is fast and cheap over what is true.
What she’s listening for
When Gilvana takes her seat as jury president at D&AD 2026, she will be listening for work where sound wasn’t a last-minute decision, but a foundational one. Where music didn’t accompany the story, but drove it. Where the sound detail is what makes a scene stick, even if the viewer never quite knows why.
That’s her benchmark, and it’s a demanding one. It requires not just craft, but conviction — the belief, from the very beginning of a project, that what people hear matters as much as what they see. In an industry that still too often treats sound as but an additional layer and culture as a borrowed aesthetic, Gilvana Viana has spent her career arguing, building, and proving otherwise.
The jury president seat at D&AD is, in that sense, less an arrival than a continuation. She’s been making this case for years. Is the industry finally willing to listen?
