Connector Spotlight: Gianna Shamone on Curiosity, Courage, and Using {THE AND} Card Game to Go Deeper
Some people find {THE AND} card game at a dinner party. Gianna Shamone found it on YouTube, and was instantly hooked.
A filmmaker, writer, photographer, creative producer, and storyteller, Gianna is one of the incredible voices in The Skin Deep's Connector community. Her work has taken a lot of shapes over the years, from music and artist management to creative production, coaching, and filmmaking, but the thread running through all of it is the same: the space between people, the stories we carry, and what happens when we feel safe enough to be honest.
Who Is Gianna Shamone
Gianna has always been drawn to what she calls the space between people, the things we don't say, and what happens when we feel safe enough to be honest. That curiosity has shaped nearly every chapter of her career. These days, she's bringing her different creative worlds together through visual storytelling, writing, creative collaborations, and conversations that invite people to look a little deeper.
Her passion comes back to people, always. She's fascinated by what makes us who we are: our contradictions, our tenderness, our fears, our dreams. For a long time, she put her own self-expression on the back burner while focusing entirely on creating content that would connect with other people. Over time, she realized she didn't have to choose between the two. Now she's finding the balance, making space for her own voice while still creating work that invites others into the conversation. That intersection, self-expression meeting connection, is what excites her most about her work today.
How She Discovered {THE AND} Card Game
Gianna discovered The Skin Deep and {THE AND} through the brand's YouTube channel a few years ago. What hooked her was how many things she loves it brought together in one place: connection, intimacy, human behavior, card games, playfulness, and the kind of deep conversation that can take you somewhere you didn't expect to go.
She points to the balance between depth and fun as what makes it work. It doesn't make vulnerability feel overly serious or intimidating; instead, it creates an environment where people can get curious about each other, laugh, play, and then suddenly find themselves having a genuinely meaningful conversation.
As Gianna puts it, so much of modern life is about presentation, what we look like, what we're doing, what we've achieved. {THE AND} asks a different question: what happens when we actually get curious about each other? That question is closely aligned with how she sees the world and the kind of work she wants to be part of.
What The Skin Deep Means to Her
To Gianna, The Skin Deep represents courage through curiosity. It's a reminder that intimacy doesn't necessarily come from knowing everything about someone. Sometimes it comes from asking the question you've been afraid to ask, and actually listening to the answer, how someone responds, how their body moves while answering, how deep a question has to go before real emotion shows through. She loves that the brand makes vulnerability feel less like a weakness and more like a form of connection.
Using the Strangers and Self Editions in Real Life
Gianna isn't just an admirer from a distance, {THE AND} has found its way into her actual relationships and creative work. She's currently in a long-distance relationship, and she and her partner have been using the Strangers edition regularly to get to know themselves better before eventually moving into the Relationship edition. It's already created beautiful moments between them.
She's also brought {THE AND} into her professional work: the Self edition made an appearance at a creative writing workshop she hosted in Lisbon, where it served as the perfect icebreaker to help participants build the intimacy needed to be vulnerable in their own writing.
Her favorite part of sharing {THE AND} with others is watching people surprise themselves. There's something beautiful, she says, about asking a question and realizing you've opened a door neither person expected to walk through, moments when a conversation suddenly becomes deeper, funnier, more vulnerable, or more honest than anyone anticipated. For Gianna, {THE AND} isn't about having the perfect answer. It's about being willing to go there.
What She Hopes People Feel
Gianna hopes people walk away from an interaction with her, or her work, feeling a little more permission to be themselves. Maybe they feel seen. Maybe they feel inspired to say something they've been holding back. Maybe they laugh. Maybe they question something they thought they knew about themselves. Mostly, she wants people to leave feeling a little more connected, to themselves, to another person, or simply to the possibility of something more.
What's Next for Gianna
Right now, Gianna is bringing together several different parts of her creative life: filmmaking and visual storytelling, writing, brand collaborations, and developing work around visibility and authentic self-expression. She's also writing and developing longer-form creative projects, including a novel inspired by a story her mother used to tell her as a bedtime story.
A lot of what she's creating right now circles back to the same underlying question: what happens when we stop hiding the parts of ourselves that want to be expressed?
A Fun Fact
One of Gianna's favorite daily rituals is carving out a little pocket of slowness before the day really begins, music, something warm to drink, and usually some kind of writing or daydreaming. She also has a slightly obsessive relationship with music from the '60s through the '90s, and will absolutely turn an ordinary moment into a music video if given the opportunity.
"Your life gets bigger when you stop editing yourself to fit inside someone else's idea of who you should be." — Gianna Shamone
Connect with Gianna Shamone
Follow along with her work:
Want to Be Featured Next?
If Gianna's story resonates with you, and you're part of The Skin Deep community too, we'd love to hear yours.
Comments ()