Masiela Lusha

Masiela’s sensibility was cultivated across Tirana, Budapest, and Vienna — three storied cities that taught her the texture of an older Europe, where craft is a habit and slowness is a discipline. By the time her family arrived in Michigan, she had already lived inside three languages and three sovereign cultures.

English was Masiela’s fourth language. The slowness of finding emotion and sentiment through language — of learning a people by learning their words — is the formative discipline of her working life.

Her first book of poetry, Inner Thoughts, was published when she was twelve, in two languages — making her, by the Michigan press’s account, the youngest author in the world to publish in two languages simultaneously. She was named among North America’s Top Ten Talented Poets and received recognition from President Bill Clinton before graduating high school at fifteen. She was admitted to UCLA as a junior at eighteen and graduated with a degree in English.

Five books of poetry followed: Drinking the Moon, Amore Celeste, The Call, and The Living Air. A novel, The Besa, written in a single month and named for the ancient Albanian code of honor and hospitality. Two children’s books in three languages. Translations of Mother Teresa’s poems and prayers from their original Albanian — in a labor she has called the most precious of her career.

Her most recent work, The 12 Veils of Hope, is a sequence of one hundred and thirty-seven haiku arranged in twelve movements. An Amazon best seller in modern poetry. Its architecture — movements, not chapters — would later inform the structure of MAISON D’VUE itself.

Audiences recognize Masiela as an actress. She made her television debut at fifteen and went on to portray Carmen Lopez in the Warner Bros. television series George Lopez, which aired on ABC for five seasons and was globally syndicated across more than seventy countries. The role earned her two consecutive Young Artist Awards.

She has appeared in over thirty film and television projects, including Sony Pictures’ Blood: The Last Vampire and SyFy’s Sharknado franchise. She has lent her voice, in Clifford’s Puppy Days on PBS, to a generation of children who learned to read alongside her.

Masiela’s humanitarian work has been continuous since her early twenties. She was named the first Global Goodwill Ambassador of the World Assembly of Youth — the inaugural appointee to a role created for her, at the United Nations’ principal coordinating body for global youth, founded at Westminster Hall in 1949 and granted general consultative status with the UN Economic and Social Council.

Masiela was named the first Ambassador for Sentebale, the charity established in 2006 by Prince Harry and Prince Seeiso of Lesotho in honor of their late mothers, to support children affected by HIV/AIDS in southern Africa.

She has also served as ambassador to Athgo International. In time, Masiela founded her own — Children of the World.

She is an active advocate for UN Women.

MAISON D’VUE is, in her telling, a seventh book — a composition. A poet selects the right word and places it in the right line. A maison selects the right botanical and places it in the right composition. The two disciplines are, she believes, the same discipline.

Fourteen rare essences, signed in a single scent, made in the patience that the work requires.

The maison is her seventh book. Affinity Compositions™ is the language she invented for it — anhydrous botanical compositions engineered for biological affinity with the surfaces that receive them.

The first chapter is the Hair Elixir. Makeup follows. Lifestyle, in time. The house she is composing is meant to be read across her life.