Mia Rio is a trilingual Brazilian-American singer and actress based out of Atlanta, GA, USA. Mia was born in Rio de Janeiro, Brazil to a military family, but spent most of her years in Brasilia, the capital, before moving to America in her early adult years.
Mia started her career in church musical theater as early as 10 years old. As a teenager, Mia became part of worship teams, church and school choirs, dance teams and performed in street theater, combining all her passions into one. The love for reaching God's heart by singing Worship music drove Mia into starting the Brazilian Worship group Arca along with her best childhood friend. Having to juggle her corporate and creative lives as a young adult, Mia developed a career in Experiential Marketing while casually pursuing Music and Acting, booking her first acting role in 2008 for a Virginia based law firm commercial. A perceived success in Music came shortly after with Mia getting signed to Javo Records in 2009 under her birth name Michelle Paulino after being discovered on MySpace by American Gospel Rap pioneer Lil' Raskull. Mia was later signed to a second label and started moving towards a positive secular Pop sound with her single Good Girl, going independent, and later adopting the alias Mia Rio in 2017. Releasing her lead independent single Dynamite Love, Mia has racked up over 56,000 streams of the single with no Marketing. The song appears on the TV show Vida on STARZ and was a finalist with honorable mention in the EDM category of the 2017 International Songwriting Competition, judged by names such as Lorde, Natalie Grant and Ziggy Marley. Mia is also an actress. She landed her first role in Television on the Oprah Winfrey show 'Greenleaf', and has acted in over 20 film and TV projects since the start of her career in 2018. Since the 2020 pandemic, Mia has returned to her Worship roots where she believes she truly belongs to, and released her first Worship project in July 2021. Mia owns the brand {PURE}, a T-shirt brand that advocates for women not having to conform with the ideas of success that Western society rewards and celebrates, redefining the idea of success, beauty, and happiness.
