P.J. Maia

Paulo José Maia was born in Campo Grande, Brazil, to an engineer mother, a businessman father and a very imaginative older brother. As a child, he was fascinated with languages and fantastic tales. He was a fluent English speaker by the age of 15, before moving to the United States as an exchange student. None of his new American classmates were able to pronounce his name, so they nicknamed him P.J. Under the influence of his English teacher in Sioux Falls, South Dakota, P.J. joined his high school's Writers' Guild. He would later get a degree in Radio & TV Media at the Armando Álvares Penteado Foundation in Sao Paulo and then move to New York City, where he learned screenwriting at NYU and kicked off a career as a TV news producer. P.J. has been going back and forth between hemispheres and bubbling up adventures in his mind ever since.