We caught up with the brilliant and insightful Mariona Mora a few weeks ago and have shared our conversation below.

Alright, Mariona thanks for taking the time to share your stories and insights with us today. When did you first know you wanted to pursue a creative/artistic path professionally?

I was a very creative child. I spent hours writing stories, reimagining their endings, and coming up with new characters just for the fun of it. I loved imagining, creating, and surprising my family. Years later, in university, I took a graphic design class and was fascinated by how a single brief could lead to so many diverse and unique visual interpretations. That made me realize that I could do it too — that I could explore and develop my own style and artistic sensibility.

Mariona , before we move on to more of these sorts of questions, can you take some time to bring our readers up to speed on you and what you do?

My name is Mariona Mora, and I’m an Art Director and Creative Consultant working in fashion, art, and culture. For nearly four years, I worked as the Head of Communications at Gabriel for Sach, a Barcelona-based fashion brand, where I gained a deep understanding of how a brand operates from the inside. I deeply admired the brand’s core values and aesthetic universe, so it was exciting to dive in and start creating from within.

During that time, I had full creative freedom to design and curate projects from concept to execution, including designing publications, curating special events, and art directing communication campaigns — all while collaborating with incredible talents in the industry, which made the experience even more enriching and provided meaningful professional insight.

I now work independently on art direction and set design projects and have had the opportunity to work with brands I admire, like Santa & Cole or Art Paper Editions. Alongside that, I’m leading a project I launched with my best friend – Cantina Simona, a food design studio that explores narratives around food and the experiences that arise from it. It’s truly inspiring to work with such a universal medium and still find endless ways to surprise, to tell a story.

What do you think is the goal or mission that drives your creative journey?

I find myself thinking about this a lot lately, and I feel like it’s something that will stay with me throughout life, as I continue learning and growing. “What can I do for this world?”. I used to think I couldn’t do much, but I don’t see it that way anymore.

I want my work to have an impact, maybe by changing something, maybe by representing the ideas I believe in so others can see them and, perhaps, shift their perspective too.

Take Cantina Simona, my personal project related to food. We’re working and rethinking our approach so that, beyond being an artistic project and a visual exploration of food as a medium, it can also serve as a platform to help eradicate hunger, make fresh, healthy food more accessible, and provide education on nutrition and sustainability. Our goal is to find the right format to bring both worlds together—to create inspiring work that truly makes a difference.

How can we best help foster a strong, supportive environment for artists and creatives?

Make space for them. And from a very early age, so that all children can grow up and develop in an environment that fosters freedom and self-expression. It could be reading, painting, writing, dancing. Anything that invites you to find your own way of doing it. When there’s freedom to play, unique things happen.

Last year, I worked on a project that collaborated with Wide Rainbow, a New York-based nonprofit that offers free after-school contemporary art programs for children and under-resourced communities. I was very moved by their mission, and it made me think a lot about how important it is to bring art into children’s lives – show them things can be done differently, that there are endless ways to express oneself, not just the ones we’re taught. Madhu Raghavendra puts it simply in one of his beautiful poems, “art is non-essential, until it is not”.

Contact Info:

• Website: https://www.marionamora.com/
• Instagram: https://www.instagram.com/marionamorav/