Edgardo Miranda-Rodríguez
Creator, La Borinqueña · Founder & Creative Director, Somos Arte · Eisner Humanitarian Award winner · US Department of State arts envoy
Conversations
The man who made a superhero to save real people
How an independent Puerto Rican superhero series became a philanthropic engine, why representation gets designed on purpose, and the case that art without a business model stays small.
Transcript →In their words
Art for the sake of art is not going to reach the masses if there isn't a business behind it. A graphic novel is a commercial form of art — understanding that it is business-minded is what lets the story survive.C·008
Corridor Context
Edgardo Miranda-Rodríguez is the creator of La Borinqueña, the first Afro-Latina Puerto Rican superhero, and founder of Somos Arte in Brooklyn. Through the La Borinqueña Grant Awards, Somos Arte has awarded more than $250,000 to nonprofits across Puerto Rico. His anthology Ricanstruction, a collaboration with DC Comics after Hurricane María, hit number one on Amazon for four months and won an Eisner Award for humanitarian work. La Borinqueña is in the permanent collection of the Smithsonian and appears in The Promise of a Nation, the Smithsonian's 250th-anniversary book. He has served as a US Department of State arts envoy and taught at MIT, Princeton, and Columbia.
The arc they moved through
A warm, rapid-fire start. Pride, personality, and the one word in each guest's language that English can't touch.
Where they come from, and how it shaped the way they build, invest, and lead. Terroir over resume.
The real work. The honest business, the hard decisions, the bet they're actually making. Host as peer, not fan.
The jam session. Escalating questions, playful to profound, and one answer the guest can save "pa' la sobremesa."
The same closing question, every guest, forever: who held the door open for you, and whose name goes on the door you're holding open?