Growing up in Santa Cruz de la Sierra, Bolivia, Ángela watched her hometown grow into a major city, and her own early years were shaped by the evolution of technology around her. She went from a collection of VHS movies in childhood, to digital cameras and MSN as a teenager, to smartphones throughout her twenties — and developed a deep appreciation for how much technology widened her language learning opportunities, whether that meant immersing herself in English and German by watching Aladdin on VHS, or keeping up with friends from an exchange program through German blogs.

Driven by her professional dedication to foreign languages, both as a teacher and as a learner, she embraced a wanderer’s lifestyle that took her to Spain, Peru and Germany. Along the way she mastered the art of cooking a Spanish tortilla, earned her first master’s degree while working abroad in Peru, and learned to enjoy the changing seasons in Germany.

Ultimately she chose to make a more permanent home in Brazil, and found that Live Lingua was the perfect way to continue her journey.

She finds enormous inspiration and motivation in learning through new challenges. Whenever she encounters something new, she deliberately takes an observational approach, studying how others problem-solve, think and navigate situations, so she can absorb their perspectives, strategies and methods.

Beyond professional collaboration, she draws inspiration from storytelling across all kinds of media — books, television series and comics. Sports anime in particular tends to motivate her to go the extra mile.

Ángela can act and dance. She has tried urban, heels, jazz and contemporary, but her biggest passion is ballet, which she started at the age of seven.

During her college years she was an active amateur actress, and learned how to recite 17th-century Spanish verse. She thinks that in another life she would have dedicated herself to musical theater.

Her spatial awareness is practically nonexistent. It took her 30 years to learn to ride a bike outside her home, and getting her driver’s license is still on hold — hopefully until next year.

Since she is used to being a fast learner, she can also get impatient when something takes longer than expected, which sometimes costs her interest in it. She has a lot of patience with her students’ progress, but sometimes very little with herself — as the Spanish refrán has it, “En casa de herrero, cuchillo de palo”, the equivalent of “the shoemaker’s children always go barefoot”.

• She is scared of heights, but loves rollercoaster rides.
• Her father was born in São Paulo and spent all his childhood summers there, which allowed her to get Brazilian citizenship — though she first started learning Portuguese while living in Germany.
• She collects Japanese manga in the different languages she understands, and so far has volumes of her favorite series in Spanish, French, German and Portuguese.
• Her grandmother is a children’s book author.
• She likes to read and learn about different forms of neurodivergence in her free time.

• Favorite Color: Pink
• Favorite Drink: Coffee
• Favorite Season: Spring
• Favorite Animals: Cats, sloths and wolves
• Favorite Authors: Miguel de Cervantes, Gloria Anzaldúa, Alejandra Pizarnik
• All-Time Heroes: Adela Zamudio (real) and Izuku Midoriya (fictional)