Kamusta! I'm Judith Marie Ortiz, but you can call me Juju. I'm a first-generation Filipino-Australian, a cis woman, a mother of two, and a proud daughter, sister, and aunty. I'm also a creative based in Meanjin (Brisbane), and a recovering assimilator learning to embrace and celebrate the parts of myself I once felt compelled to suppress.

But it wasn't always this way.

There was a pivotal moment in my journey that shattered the internal colonial tower I had unknowingly built over decades of assimilation. It happened when I selected a photo for some marketing collateral, a photo I believed represented the campaign well. But my employer rejected it, saying:

"This image of this Asian girl needs to change. It's not Australian enough. I don't want the market's first impression of our brand to be associated with cheap and nasty products made in China."

That moment woke me up to two harsh realities:

1. I realised how much of my Filipino identity I had suppressed to fit into white Australia. No matter how much of my culture I abandoned, or the fact that I was born here, or how "ocker" I spoke — I still couldn't meet the narrow standard of what it meant to be "Australian." Simply because I looked Filipino. I'd been living disconnected from my heritage, from Mother Earth, and from my true self.

2. I saw that mainstream branding isn't just about selling products, it's about selling ideas and it’s not neutral. Branding had played a huge role in what my employer said to me. These ideas, deeply rooted in colonialism, reinforce harmful narratives that shape our beliefs and behaviours from an early age. They affect how we see race, gender, politics and consumption, while silencing diverse voices in the process. And for years, I had fed those narratives too in my work, and in my life.

That moment became a turning point. It made me question the role I'd played, as a creative, in perpetuating the very systems that produced it. And it set me on a path I'm still walking: using design, marketing and storytelling to dismantle those systems instead of serving them.

Because here's what I've come to understand. The colonial mindset is a scarcity mindset. It believes there's a fixed amount of space, worth and belonging so it divides everything up. It boxes people, labels them, tells them they're half of this and half of that. And it does the same thing to organisations: it teaches them to hoard, to compete to dominate, to flatten whole audiences into markets, to believe there's only ever enough room for some of us to matter.

But scarcity was always the lie. In space, a planet doesn't shrink because another planet exists nearby. A person was never a glass with a limit and neither is a business. Both can be whole. Both can hold every culture, language and contradiction, and grow larger for it, not smaller.

That belief is underneath everything I make now, whether I'm working with a person or an entire organisation. My work goes beyond visuals or campaigns. It's about one thing: belonging and dignity should never have been conditional. And so much of what I do is about taking back the pieces of ourselves that we were told to trade for them. Restoring what colonisation severed: culture, kapwa, Country, and self.

As a mother, I think often about the world my children will inherit. I don't want them to spend decades unlearning what I did. I want them to know, from the very start, that they are not half of anything. They are already whole. Already enough. Already many beautiful things.

My journey from assimilation to reclamation is ongoing. But it fuels everything I create.

Salamat.