Marcella

Marcella Ricca is co-founder and Chief Content Officer of Mini Studio, an AI-native animation studio making personalised children's cartoons built around social and emotional learning. She created the studio's 'story sparks' system, the framework aligning emotion, values and narrative structure across everything it makes. AI has made children's content cheap to produce and largely interchangeable; that framework is what stops Mini Studio's output being either, and investors consistently point to the storytelling as the studio's clearest differentiator. Marcella came to it from clinical neuropsychology, where she developed a therapeutic storytelling system she used with clients internationally, and from community development work using art and storytelling to build self-sufficiency.