ABOUT
THAIS AQUINO

I wasn’t always someone who took up space.

I come from a long lineage of women who swallowed their words, softened their edges, and lived in-between their true existence, between what was originally felt and what was allowed. For years, I lived inside a quiet contraction, where expressing my truth felt dangerous and my voice, buried beneath layers of fear and silence.

My journey with Soul Portraits is a journey of unhiding. It’s about honoring what is tender, cyclical, messy, wild, true. Photography came to me not as a career, but as a code, a way to speak what my voice couldn’t yet say. It cracked me open. It became a language I could finally trust and the best part, it connected me to others is a deep and intimate way. Through photography rites, I found a way to see, hold and reflect back what was sacred, subtle, and unseen, not just in others, but in myself.

I live between worlds, places and seasons. This past decade I shared my time between New York, Hawai’i and Brasil. Each land I’ve touched, each ocean I’ve bathed in, each culture I experienced, each pause I took, each teacher I encountered and lovers I loved have shaped the way I hold myself and space. I don’t work with formulas, a particular lineage or protocol. I simply do my best to cultivate impeccable presence and companionship. I attune to what’s alive in you, what’s ready to be remembered and expressed. I have no interest in controlling how I session will unfold. My love is always with the mystery.

I am a healing artist, photographer, mentor and somatic guide, yet I resist being boxed into any title, as my fullhearted human nature is where my deepest service comes from.

And I’m here not to define you, but to remember you, with you.

For several years, I photographed campaigns in New York for brands like L'Oréal, Garnier, Coca-Cola, Bloomingdale’s. My photographed has moved through luxury hotels like The Mandarin Oriental, The Fairmont, The William Vale, and captured iconic celebrity faces like Jessica Alba and Yaya DaCosta.

My photography has been featured in renowned publications including:

W Magazine, British Vogue, OprahDaily, Glamour, USA Today, Parents, HuffPost, Refinery29, ABCNews, and PopSugar.

I used to shoot for the biggest brands.
Now I guide the deepest artists.

I carry an ancestral mission to contribute to collective healing, and midline of culture. A quiet urgency to liberate hidden parts of self: sensuality, voice, presence, truth.

There is a sacred ache in me to honor the poetry of women's seasons: aging, motherhood, death/rebirth, illness, and the spaces between.

Time and again, I’ve noticed that healers, space holders, midwives of culture, arrive at a seasonal threshold where something in them is ready to be freed, to be seen.

Soul Portrait was born for this necessary act of recognition, this rite of passage. I create photography as a healing art that affects culture through individual and collective empowerment and reclamation of a sense of truth and authenticity, necessary for culture to develop with wholeness, inclusion and interdependence. My clients are often highly sensitive and creative artists, teachers, healers, leaders, and mothers, people who hold space for others and rarely get to be held themselves. 

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LAST USA TOUR

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LAST USA TOUR •

NEW YORK UNTIL SEPTEMBER 2026