About

Hi there,

My name is Larissa Veloso and I’m a Brazilian Journalist turned into Canadian Data Analyst. “Ladislara” was the middle name of one of my great-grandmothers. I’ve appropriated it and it has been my identity online from day one.

In line to ask Bob Woodward a burning question. Photo: Dru Thompson

I was born and raised in the Brazilian state of Minas Gerais (in the capital BH). In 2016 I immigrated to Canada and I currently live in Toronto with my cat Lucy.

I’ve had a passion for writing since I was a kid and had many blogs over the years. Other than writing online, I decided to turn that passion into my career, became a full-time journalist and spent a decade working in newsrooms in Brazil.

My career started on the radio, in the Rádio UFMG Educativa, where we would focus on educational content and what we called citizen journalism – stories that would truly inform and have a positive impact on the public.

In my times as radio reporter with Mariana Congo

After that, I spent a year working for the NGO Oficina de Imagens, an organization that still works to promote children’s rights, especially in the most impoverished areas of the state. It was there that I had the chance to work on a Unicef project.

I then moved on to work on an all-news website, O Tempo, in which I ended up being promoted to multimedia reporter – that was in 2009 when newspaper publishers were still figuring out how to work with the online format.

After graduating in Social Communications at UFMG University I’ve got the opportunity to work for a national weekly magazine (IstoÉ) writing about Sustainability. That job took me to São Paulo, where I lived for 3 years. Some time later I decided to go on freelancing – that’s when I wrote some of my best stories. I eventually returned to the newsrooms to cover Politics in the newspaper O Tempo.

It was when I decided to leave my journalism career and move to Canada, in 2016. Adapting wasn’t easy and it took me a long time to find a new career path. In 2020 I got a job as a Content Coordinator in a promising startup in the wellness industry – InteraXon. Two years later, thanks to the support of my boss, I decided to try an old passion: data analysis and data visualization.

It has been an amazing journey into this new field, and I feel like I finally found my place in the Canadian job market.

I couldn’t quit my writing though. For someone who made a career out of writing in Portuguese, finding my voice in English was a long process as well. In this journey, I am fortunate enough to count on the support of my partner, Dru, who not only has been my most loyal admirer but also my content creation partner.

On my 38th birthday. Photo: Dru Thompson

I occasionally post stories on Instagram with some short insights and data points and I have also a YouTube channel with Dru called The Long Answer — the drafts that don’t get turned into videos end up here as a blog post.

During my life, I’ve also worked as a volunteer in a cat shelter, owned an online boutique to sell used clothes, opened an Etsy shop to sell budget templates, made some money pet-sitting elderly cats and created a project to explain the Constitution on the radio. I’m also currently an amateur Maracatu drummer because apparently, I can’t sit still. 😅

This is one in a long line of blogs and attempts to build my presence online as a content creator. Unlike the previous blogs, I decided that this one would be a personal blog, to write about all the things that keep circulating in my head. That’s why we have so many diverse topics, from politics to home decor.

This blog is as diverse as my life has been. I hope you enjoy it.