Co-founder of Melon Breakers, with experience in the hospitality sector, where she has developed unique brand voices and powerful narratives for independent hoteliers and major chains such as B&B Hotels, Eurostars Group, and Petit Palace. In 2017, she joined WANNA, a studio she co-directed until its closure in January 2025, whose projects earned both national and international recognition. Before that, she built a solid career in advertising, collaborating with leading agencies and working as an independent creative for global brands. Her love for language and storytelling led her to earn a degree in Journalism from the Universities of Valencia and Vienna, and to specialize in text editing, branded content, and transmedia storytelling. With more than 10 years of experience, María is a creative mind, a natural-born storyteller, Programme Leader of the first edition of the Master’s in Creative Direction for Commercial Spaces at IED Madrid, a speaker… and a proud mom of two little ones.
Melon Breakers was born in 2025 out of a deep conviction: brands can be engines of cultural, social, and economic transformation. And their spaces, more than mere places, can become living stages for encounter, exchange, and conversation. The studio, co-founded by María Lillo and Cathy Figueiredo, offers holistic, approachable, and expert guidance to help companies discover, define, and communicate their purpose through every brand touchpoint: from strategy to narrative, through visual identity and experience creation, to the design of physical spaces. All with a clear purpose: to improve, through creativity, the world we inhabit.
