Chrys Gringo

I had a music production company in São Paulo and a career on the rise. In 2012, midway through a music degree at Universidade Anhembi Morumbi, I was kidnapped. I barely made it out alive.

What came after — the trauma, the panic, the PTSD — forced me to stop everything. I closed the company, left São Paulo, and retreated to the countryside to heal. And I decided to start over, far from there.

I applied to immigrate to Canada as a self-employed music producer and moved to Squamish, a town of 20,000 in the mountains of British Columbia. No network, no studio, no audience. That's where I started a YouTube channel — just to teach what I knew.

That channel passed 29 million views and 290,000 subscribers, one of the largest in music production and audio in Portuguese — and over 10,000 courses sold in 20 years, 2,000 of them Produtor Pro. For years, that was my life: YouTube and teaching.

Eleven years into Canada, I was invited to teach at a college and a university — even without a bachelor's degree. That pushed me to finish what I'd started. Full Sail University recognized my 20 years of experience: it granted me an Associate degree in Recording Arts, waived more than half of the Music Production bachelor, and awarded me the maximum scholarship a foreign student can receive. I graduate on September 4.

I paused a Berklee guitar certificate three courses short and came to the United States to finish my studies and step back into the music industry. After years of teaching, I'm returning to what started it all — composing. My focus now is music for film.