Angelica Dass has given quite a few keynote speeches over the years, and her talk at the International Association of Beauty Professionals (IAAP) conference in Vancouver in 2021 was titled “Beauty and intelligence: A partnership”. At the conference she shared that beauty is “the capacity to be seen”. We often take beauty for granted, forgetting that beauty is a quality inherent to all humans, and that all humans have the same potential for beauty. Angelica Dass is an ethnic Brazilian who lives in Brazil, and she was born in Belem, Brazil.
Angelica Dass was a former Brazilian actress and model. She has mastered the art of photographing people with different ethnic backgrounds, skin tones, and heights, all of which gives an interesting insight into the way in which we view ourselves as human beings. Her subjects come from all over the world, and her career has taken her around the globe, from New York to Rome to London to Sydney to Brasilia, where she has honed her skills as a national and international Brazilian photographer.
In her talk at the IAAP conference, Angelica Dass discusses how ethnicity shapes our self-perception, and what we need to do to see ourselves in a positive light. We know that beauty comes in all forms, but some of us go into our lives wanting only what we cannot have. For Angelica Dass, this is an impediment to true happiness. Angelica Dass says that although people sometimes see her photographs as being too “high fashion”, they actually are an expression of her desire for true beauty, regardless of one’s height or skin color. By creating beautiful portraits of very tall, very thin people, she shows them how beautiful they really are underneath all the layers that society puts on them.