vancouver speaker. artist. provocateur.

Vancouver Portrait Photographer Michele in white blazer with red lipstick

I’m michele Mateus

I’m the mixtape

head bobbing, heart clenching

Black and white image of a wall with texture and shadows.

I am not your typical speaker, I’m a conversation starter.

I don’t have a quick 10 steps to success to share, but I do say the things everyone else is tiptoeing around.

Things flow organically, you can can see people are nodding because they are really listening, what I share is landing in ways people didn’t even know they needed to hear.

Curiosity, creativity, connection. These are the tracks I speak on.

I go first. And the room always goes somewhere good.

what your audience walks away with

That feeling the morning after a damn good conversation.

Where something feels different.

A laugh that surprised them.
Maybe a cry they didn’t see coming.
New ideas, and more yet to come.

Not a framework.

A feeling.

The type of feeling where the noise drops
and something clicks into place

book me

A nostalgic arrangement of vintage cassette tapes displayed on a soft, white fabric surface.

recent press & Features

CBC vancouver. Rangefinder. the Portrait masters. vancouver guardian.
By the North. Ripple of Change. Pecha Kucha New West

how I show up

I show up as the full version because she’s all I know. I’m, honest, raw, and some find me funny. Allergic to small talk? Me too, which and you will soon find out.

WHAT I
SPEAK ABOUT

Curiosity, Creativity, Connection.
I speak about why these three aren’t nice-to-haves, but actual lifelines that are available to each of us in unique ways, then we go into what gets possible when you follow them somewhere honest.

who am I

I’m an award-winning photographer, artist, neurodivergent human, and speaker
based in Vancouver.

People ask me all the time how I became so resilient, and my simple answer always circles back to what I speak about. No spoilers!

I carry the wisdom of the people who shaped me, and there’s too many to thank, but shout out to my grandmother!

read my bio

Creativity is the
frequency I tune into

It’s always there for me and I know it’s can for you too. Like life, creativity is messy and all over the place, but we gotta stick with it, be playful and not be so connected to the results.

Creativity has become the most reliable place for me to land when everything feels too much, and I wish that for you too.

Let’s chat

some Conversations we can have

These are some of the territories I love to explore. They’re not a setlist, they’re a starting point. Bring me a topic, a question, a room, and we’ll find where it wants to go.

There’s a lot of talk about taking up space, being loud, making noise. And this world does need more voices, especially from people who’ve been underrepresented. But loud is not the only way.

As a music lover I like to think about the difference between a small venue and an arena. The artist is the same. The music is the same. But something happens in a small room that can’t happen in a stadium, and I will take that to my grave.

That’s the frequency I’m interested in. Quietly intense. Present without having to overdo the performance.

We live in an overstimulated world that’s always pushing for more and it’s exhausting. In that context, choosing to get quiet isn’t hiding. It isn’t playing
small. It’s an act of rebellion. And it might be the place where the most honest, most powerful version of you actually lives.

This conversation explores what intimacy actually means, and why we have been continued to believe that volume equals power. We can get into how this approach allows room for both introverts and extroverts and that taking up space is not always about making more noise.

We’ve been trained to fill the frame. More outfits, more props, more production more everything. And here’s the thing: all that stuff is well… comfortable and quite frankly causes distraction, because when the frame is full of all the things then no one really sees YOU.

This conversation is about presence, which honestly is the hardest thing to fake, yet is often the most magnetic energy when tapped into. We live in a time where no-one really knows what is real anymore, so the way I see it is that perhaps it’s time to reconsider what showing up looks like, because honestly and I say this with love, folks it’s all starting to look the same.

As a photographer I believe in finding the beauty in the ordinary, and connecting with our humanity. I also believe that in doing so this might be the most radical thing of our time.

This conversation is not about how to plan your next photoshoot, it’s about exploring identity, it’s about finding wonder in the ordinary. It’s about about being human in a world where nothing feels real anymore.

You are creative, You always were creative. Someone sadly talked you out of it, but this conversation will remind me you to rediscover that side of yourself.

Somewhere along the way, creativity got turned into a productivity exercise. A talent reserved for artists. Something you had to be good at, or justify, or monetise.

I am sure many have heard people say:

Why are you daydreaming?
Why are you doodling?
Get back to work.

I’ve heard all that nonsense too, and I want to help us all take a collective breathe and move past the messages that hose carry, that creativity is not important. After reconnecting with my own creativity as a form of processing the grief I carried in losing my mother far to young, I came to see that creativity isn’t a waste of time, or a talent only some are born with. It’s a birthright.

Creativity is not about impressing others. It doesn’t need to produce anything. It just need to move through us, to help us feel something deeper within, to help us process the human experience.

I speak about this from the inside. I’ve raised a child with complex needs who has struggled with his mental health. I’ve struggled with mine. And what I’ve come back to, again and again, on the heavy days, the days the world felt like too much as been my creativity. Not as output. As a place to land. A way to move energy when words felt exhausting.

This topic is for all humans, especially the ones navigating mental health, burn out and the overwhelm of it all. The goal is to remind people that we are all creative beings, and how through making, an playing (a personal fav of mine!) we can find a place to rest that isn’t asking anything of us.

Everything made sense and nothing changed. The strange gift of finally having language for a life you already lived.

This conversation is shared through my lived experience, like all the rest. It’s about raising a child with complex and high support needs, a child that appears ‘normal’ but was suffering so deeply on the inside. It’s also about my realising I am not as cool and chill of a parent as I thought I was, how’s that for a confession! I have had to unlearn everything I was taught about what good parenting looks like. Grieving. Being parented by the process. Radical softness as survival. That’s what we can get into for this conversation, and it all needs to be said out loud more because I know, like me, there are more parents out there, like me, that really need to hear this.

let’s talk

i’m not a motivational speaker,
I’m a PROVOCATEUR with a heart,
who loves f* Words and storytelling.

Conferences, festivals, events, podcasts.
Honestly, I’m up for anywhere the conversation is
allowed to go somewhere real.

If you think we’d vibe, then let’s make it happen.

BOOK ME