As part of our continuing series of Friends of Vik Muniz, today we look at director Carlos Saldanha. Carlos Saldanha is an Oscar-nominated Brazilian director of several beloved animated features, including the Ice Age series and his latest success, Rio—a love letter to his hometown. He joined Blue Sky in 1993 after graduating from the MFA program at the School of Visual Arts in New York. Since then, he has been considered one of the most successful directors of animated features in the industry.

Eduardo Taborda's mindmelting drawings are nightmarish visions founded on meticulous linework and heavy symbolism. Working primarily in black and white, Taborda shows a staggering attention to detail and a strong commitment to the gruesome in apocalyptic tableaus where dying men beg for mercy and burst into flames. Taborda is based in Porto Alegre, Brazil.

As we continue our series of featuring the Friends Of Brazilian great, Vik Muniz, today we look at the award-winning design team of brothers Fernando and Humberto Campana. Campana Designs have long been known for their unique combination of craft-meets-contemporary, recycled-meets-high design furniture. The Campanas have garnered massive critical attention for their innovative furniture made from everyday materials and waste products like cardboard, fabric scraps, rope, aluminum wire, and plastic tubes.

Mark Bradford is best known for his large-scale paintings made from materials that he gathers from the streets around his Los Angeles studio. Using both collage and décollage techniques, Bradford creates abstract works that can be seen as topographies of the city's physical as well as social, economic, and cultural landscape.

Brazilian artist and activist Vik Muniz, renowned designers The Campana Brothers, visual artist Mark Bradford, and director Carlos Saldanha have all designed limited-edition T-shirts as part of "Friends of Vik Muniz for Spectaculu." Help support Spectaculu and raise awareness about the amazing opportunities that the art and technology school bring to Rio de Janeiro's youth.

Lucas Simões is an artist living and working in Sao Paulo, Brazil. Through a combination of both geometric and organic shapes overlaid, he's been able to use cut out photographs of close friends to explore identity and cultural individualism.

Brazilian artist Dimas Forchetti sent us images of his most recent works, and as we can always see from the artist, his illustrations are full of detailed local symbolism.

For the last decade, Brazilian based artist, Henrique Oliveria, has been creating amazing installations that use weathered strips of tampumes to evoke the stroke of a paintbrush or the folds of human flesh. This trademark style came to be after seeing the way pieces of wood were weathering at a construction site near his studio.

Japanese-Brazilian arist, Waleska Nomura, who now takes up residence in the UK, just released a print of her signature painting series, Heart In Love. The graffiti artist turned fine artist created a bit of an ambitious project for herself: 18 layer silkscreen print—8 colous each printed twice with opaque then transparent colour plus the background plus a varnish with each layer of artwork has been handpainted by the artist.

A few weeks ago, we decided to check up on Brazilian artist Bruno 9Li, who we last featured in our July 2009 Brazil Issue. We knew that Bruno's work looked like a fantastic acid trip of both folk imagery mixed with psychedelic characters, but it is Bruno's work from the past two years, with incredibly surreal abstractions and custom reoccuring figures that have been the artist's strongest work to date.