DIDIRELLA Diego Bragà is a Brazilian trans-travesti composer, filmmaker and actress from Belo Horizonte. Trained in dance and theatre, she studied at the Theatre School of the Federal University of Minas Gerais (UFMG) and at the London International School of Performing Arts. She holds a master’s degree in Criticism, Curatorship and Art Theory from the University of Lisbon’s Faculty of Fine Arts. Her career spans theatre, cinema and music. Her music has been produced by Boss In Drama and Diana XL, and in 2026 she will release her first LP, produced by Chico Neves. As an actress, she has worked with artists and groups including Grupo Galpão, Julie Beauvais, Susan Worsfold, Mickäel de Oliveira, Jérôme Bel and Tiago Rodrigues, as an actress with École des Maîtres. In 2021, she was supported by the Sundance Institute. Her films include Think About The Beautiful Future Ahead, released as a New York Times Op-Doc, and Cleópatra & António, a queer and decolonial reimagining of Shakespeare, mentored by Céline Sciamma and Lucrecia Martel.
As DIDIRELLA, she has released Geografia do Amor (2022), SUPERPUTA SPIRITUAL (2023), Onda de Amor (2024) and Minha Infância Acabou (2024). Her work combines pop and hyper-pop with theatre, cinema, eroticism and spirituality, while exploring gender, transition, sexuality and queer ancestry. A major thread throughout her work is the archive of her uncle Ricardo Wagner Braga, a gay man who died from AIDS-related causes in 2011 and left her around 1,000 personal objects, including photographs, letters, postcards and diaries. The archive became the basis for Geografia do Amor and later works, including the hyper-pop opera A Gente na Boate Sofre Junto, which premiered in 2025. Based in Lisbon, DIDIRELLA continues to work across music, film, theatre and contemporary art. In 2026, she was selected for the CAMPUS Paulo Cunha e Silva artistic residency programme in Porto.
Monika: Didirella, welcome to The Heroines of My Life!
Didirella: Thank you so much, Monika. It's an honour to be in your geography of love.
Monika: You grew up in Belo Horizonte surrounded by two very different kinds of femininity, your grandmother Leny and your uncle Ricardo, who dressed as a witch. What did those two figures teach you about being feminine before you even had words for it?
Didirella: My grandmother Leny, my father's mother, is the daughter of Portuguese parents and comes from a line of women from the north of Portugal, some of them folk healers, with a very special relationship with the plant world. You could call them European witches. When I was a child, she looked after me at weekends. I used to watch her water, caress and tend to her plants, and one day she taught me to talk to the flowers. My uncle Ricardo, my mother's brother, lived with me, my mother and my grandmother Conceição. He used to pick me up from school, and he introduced me to a whole queer universe: Madonna, Elton John, Rita Lee, Marina Lima. He would dress up as a witch and chase me around the house, letting me live out my Disney princess dream. It was a relationship built on deep empathy and respect. What the two of them had in common was that each showed me a kind of femininity: hers was ancestral; his was non-binary and queer. And they both shared a magical idea of life: they dreamed, they were passionate.
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“Over time, I learnt that the people who inflict pain are
usually the ones who desire you." Photo: João Mendes. |
Monika: You have described yourself as a child who was very effeminate and who was bullied at school. Looking back, do you think that child was already becoming DIDIRELLA, or did DIDIRELLA come much later?
Didirella: I always was her. The bullying happened because I wouldn't give in to the pressure: I didn't back down a single centimetre from what I wanted, whether in my gender performance or my sexuality. I kept rising, centimetre by centimetre, and to do that I built a verbal defence, by reading and seeking out as much information as I could, and an energetic defence against the moral and sexual harassment I suffered at Catholic school. Over time, I learnt that the people who inflict pain are usually the ones who desire you.
Monika: Your uncle Ricardo Wagner Braga was gay, HIV-positive and one of the great protectors of your childhood. What do you remember most vividly about him that could never be captured in an archive?
Didirella: He was a true Pedro Almodóvar character: wickedly irreverent, witchy. When he greeted and hugged people, he would pull faces at me behind their backs without them noticing. He had one face for when someone was boring, another for when they were fake and another for when they were ugly. He was obsessed with beauty and was forever judging it in people, as if he were on the panel of a Miss Universe pageant from the 1970s or 80s.
Monika: Ricardo left you around a thousand objects, including letters, photographs, postcards and diaries. What was the very first object you opened after inheriting the archive that made you realise you had inherited much more than belongings?
Didirella: When I opened the archive, a few years after his death, it was so overwhelming that I cried and closed it all up again. I opened it little by little, over the following days. His whole youth was there: vibrant, powerful and outrageous. It was so beautiful that I realised it was more than paper: it was utopia made real, if I can put it that way.
Monika: You have spent years transforming Ricardo's archive into art. At what point did mourning stop being only mourning and become a creative relationship with him?
Didirella: The two were intertwined the whole time. Each work I shared with the world grew more distant from me and more collective. I began to realise that Ricardo was becoming an uncle to many people, and that there are so many forgotten Ricardos out there, and that made me feel lighter. The mourning really ended last year, when I created a fictional contemporary opera from his real archive.
Monika: There is something almost cinematic about a gay man from another generation leaving his archive to a gender-nonconforming child who later turns it into queer art. If you could sit down with Ricardo today and show him what you have created from his life, what do you think he would say?
Didirella: He was very emotional: he would cry, he would thank me. He always wanted to travel the world, and now he does. He would feel like a king. The last Coca-Cola in the desert.
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“My Sun and Moon are both in Leo." Photo: João Peixoto. |
Monika: Your work often talks about queer ancestry. Who are the queer ancestors you feel closest to, apart from Ricardo?
Didirella: Perhaps the ones I was introduced to as a child: Madonna, Marina Lima, Xuxa, Rita Lee and, of course, David Bowie.
Monika: You have described your grandmother taking you into the forest, giving you flowers and teaching you to pray for Nature. How much of that child who experienced the world almost magically is still inside DIDIRELLA?
Didirella: All of her. I'm spending a few days in Belo Horizonte, in the house where my grandmother Leny used to live. This morning I woke up, went out to water the flowers and talked to them. The smell of wet earth and the humid heat reminded me of my purest, most blossoming days. I believe in the magic and happiness that come from childhood, when you still can't rationalise and name everything. It's liberating to speak with other kingdoms.
Monika: You once created a “cheating mafia” to help students who were bullied, because you had been bullied yourself. Were you already a little revolutionary at school?
Didirella: I was. I went from weird outcast to a kind of popular mafiosa. Catwoman from Batman, hahaha. I can't submit to a power that humiliates me. If no one has the courage to question it, you have to find a way, and I have that courage. If they let me, I'll lead the movement. My Sun and Moon are both in Leo.
Monika: You dreamed of becoming a pop singer as a child. When DIDIRELLA finally became a musician, did you feel that you had fulfilled the dream of the child Diego, or had you created an entirely different dream?
Didirella: For a while I thought the dream had changed, but when Didirella was born, I realised it hadn't. I haven't yet become my childhood dream, but I'm well on my way. I want bigger stages and bigger audiences.
Monika: Your influences include Madonna, Britney Spears, Xuxa, Yoko Ono, Rita Lee, Gal Costa and Madredeus. What happens when all those worlds meet inside your head?
Didirella: Madonna is the Great Mother, the great teacher, impossible to ignore in my life: my Sun. Britney is an older sister: she allows me to be vulnerable without losing my strength; precisely because of that, her talent is under-recognised, but undeniable. Xuxa is the utopia of a perfect world: my cousins already loved her, and so did my younger sister. She arrives in her flying saucer and, like an alien, establishes a new order of dreams. Yoko is the great witch: when I discovered her, I recognised myself in her. Brilliant and minimalist, she holds up a wall of protection; she resists. Gal Costa is the voice I wish I had, and she teaches me how to be the tropical female I long to be; she teaches you how to cast a spell. Madredeus is another dimension of music: it's meant to be felt inside, deep down.
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“For a while I thought the dream had changed, but when
Didirella was born, I realised it hadn't. Photo: Rui Palma. |
Monika: Your name DIDIRELLA sounds as if Cinderella, Barbarella and Vampirella had a slightly unhinged Brazilian cousin. How did she actually come into existence?
Didirella: I didn't want a name that already existed, because my female side is more alien than human. I thought of Tieta, Gabriela and Dona Flor, characters by the brilliant Brazilian writer Jorge Amado, but I felt it would be redundant. I thought of Barbarella and Vampirella, who are kaleidoscopic; I came across them both while researching comics for the opera. But my psychologist said it comes from Cinderella… I hadn't made the connection with that personal drama.
Monika: Is DIDIRELLA a character you created, a woman you discovered inside yourself, or simply the part of you that was no longer willing to behave?
Didirella: I think the universe created her for me. The name came to me on 23 December, and at the time I didn't even realise it would be the one. It was a Christmas present: Father Christmas brought it. The name Didirella is a Capricorn, like Rita Lee.
Monika: Your work constantly moves between the sacred and the sexual. Why do you think spirituality and eroticism belong together?
Didirella: When I talk about spirituality, I don't mean religiosity or fanaticism. In Europe, spirituality is often confused with religiosity. I'm talking about something intrinsic to us, something that comes before dogma. In primordial spiritual practices, dance was at the centre of worship; in other words, the sensual was sacred. In a strategic game of domination, that freedom was taken away, because sensuality, sensoriality, is power.
For me, sensuality is spiritual because it engages all the senses, and 90% of them bypass the rational mind. The sexual is a small part of that, a way of connecting with the Universe. It's like plugging into a socket: everything is connected by a concrete extension, a concrete union: the socket, the light bulb, the phone battery. The earth wire that makes the light come on. In the humanity I identify with, you need the other, otherness. All good sex is a dance made with Love, respect, energy and water. I'm not kinky or into fetishes at all. These are the pillars of any spiritual experience. Even if it lasts only a few minutes of your entire existence, even if it's with an anonymous other, there is a Love that cannot be rationalised.
Monika: SUPERPUTA SPIRITUAL is a title that manages to sound simultaneously provocative, comic and religious. What does being a “spiritual whore” mean to you?
Didirella: “Puta” is a Brazilian philosophy of freedom and empowerment; it has nothing to do with the profession, or not necessarily. It's the statement that you can be intelligent, powerful, an academic, rich, the boss, and still dress like a “puta”. The travesti essence carries this “puta” performance, liberating and provocative in the face of backward, so-called respectable morality. In Brazil, we have elevated the word travesti into a gender identity: trans-travesti. That is how I identify. It's a specific identity, found only in Latin America and Spain. She is sexy, the owner of her own body, and she draws inspiration from Pombagira, a female spirit revered in Umbanda, an Afro-Brazilian religion whose roots arrived in Brazil with enslaved people, as well as from peripheral and marginal sounds such as samba and funk.
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| “The cloud rained, and I was born.” Photo: João Mendes. |
Monika: You have described your transition as taking you toward something more “alchemical” than scientific. What has your changing body taught you that no theory of gender could have taught you?
Didirella: The energy of my body has changed. What once hovered above me, like a cloud, and was a possibility, has now come down and become truth. The cloud rained, and I was born. By becoming who I really am, I became a magnet for good things. The person who knows who I am is me. The body knows; doctors, therapists and teachers can only help. It's a bit like being a mutant in X-Men: when you discover your power, it means you've arrived in the right place. Now it's about learning to use it for the good of all. It's about mastering the technology I've uploaded.
END OF PART 1
All the photos: courtesy of Didirella.
© 2026 - Monika Kowalska
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