"Every project I'm part of carries a piece of me. Everything I do comes from the heart."
Rhaissa Gonçalves was born in 1990 in Curitiba, Brazil. She studied Advertising at Universidade Positivo, Photography at Universität Weimar in Germany, and later Filmmaking at the New York Film Academy in Miami. That last move changed everything: cinema became not just a career, but a way out.
In 2014, she joined IHC Studio as executive producer and became co-founder the following year. Since then, she has produced every film and commercial project the studio has released, from short films shot across four continents to Neon Heart. In 2018, she and Lucas opened IHC's second headquarters in Miami.
Rhaissa is also a professional colorist. She color-graded Neon Heart and dozens of other projects, developing a visual language that balances naturalism with emotional texture. Her color work has become one of IHC's signatures.
Beyond cinema, Rhaissa is a visual artist. She paints, experiments with mixed media, and develops personal art projects like Creatures, a series exploring identity through surreal imagery.
In 2019, Rhaissa and Lucas decided together to self-fund IHC's first feature film. It was the biggest bet of their careers. Five years of production, entirely with the studio's own money. Rhaissa produced Neon Heart and color-graded it.
The film premiered at the Cannes Film Festival in 2022, where it was called "a great example of the new Brazilian popular cinema." It screened in over 150 theaters across Brazil, Argentina, and Uruguay, and became the first Brazilian film mixed in Dolby Atmos 9.1. Awards followed in Houston, Moscow, and Brazil.
Today, Rhaissa continues leading production and color at IHC. In parallel, she is writing "What Happens After the Worst Happens", an autobiographical essay about staying standing when everything falls apart.
She raises her son Antoni Sol. She walks her Golden Retrievers. And she keeps making art, production, and color the same way she always has: with heart.