Bio

Vinicius Couto (b. 1988) is a visual artist, performer, filmmaker and creative director. Born in São Paulo, he lived in Rio de Janeiro and São Paulo before settling in Lisbon. His research crosses gender, race, class, sexuality and LGBTQIA+ movements — asserting the power of dissident bodies as active agents of social and cultural transformation.

Before dedicating himself fully to art, he built a career as an art director in advertising and fashion, working with artists and brands such as Anitta, Linn da Quebrada, Gloria Groove, Gisele Bündchen, Vogue, Elle, Nike, Adidas, Gucci and Burberry, along with art direction and costume design for music videos and films shown at festivals including Cannes, the Berlinale and Rotterdam.

In 2016, a routine test in Rio de Janeiro changed his life: “It was a blow, an absurd silence. I lay collapsed in bed and forgot everything I had learned,” he told CartaCapital. After two years of silence came what he calls his coming out of the AIDS closet — “I could no longer live in silence. Silence is a tool of conservatism in so many things.”

Since then, his work has made life with HIV visible and confronted serophobia. His first performance, I=I — Undetectable = Untransmittable, premiered in 2018 in Cairo — a country that bars people living with HIV from entering, as CartaCapital reported — and later occupied the MAM in São Paulo and, in Rio de Janeiro, the Hélio Oiticica Municipal Arts Centre. Residencies and works followed in Spain (Konvent, Etopia Zaragoza — where he held his first solo exhibition), France (Radicale 1924) and Portugal (Linha de Fuga, Casa Independente), gathered under the project PRO_CU•RAR-SE.

In film, he was production designer on the award-winning documentary Deus tem AIDS (2021), created with Gustavo Vinagre the video chempassion (2025), commissioned by Visual AIDS and premiered at the Whitney Museum, and co-directed and starred in the feature The Passion According to G.H.B. (2026), selected for the Rotterdam Film Festival.

He lives and works in Lisbon. His bio defines his field of action as a “subjective combat territory of independent art”.