LUANA ÖSTLING : SHE SPEAKS 6 LANGUAGES AND HAS BEEN TO 55+ COUNTRIES

The Girl From Everywhere

She spent this summer covering the World Cup across Los Angeles, Miami
and New York. In September she returns to America to stand at the Statue
of Liberty. Luana Ostling has lived in four countries, learned six languages
and travelled to more than fifty-five, and this may be the biggest year of all
of them.

There is a particular kind of person who can walk into any room, in any city, on any continent, and make it feel like home. Luana Ostling is that person. Ask her where she is from and you will get a pause, a smile, and then a story that takes in Brazil, Sweden, UK and Australia, six languages, and a passport that has run out of pages more than once.

“I stopped answering that question with one word a long time ago,” she says. “Home isn’t a place for me, it’s a feeling. And I’ve been lucky enough to find it in a lot of places.”

Fifty-five countries and counting. Four countries lived in, properly lived in, with a lease and a local supermarket and a favourite coffee spot, not just passed through. Six languages, spoken well enough to argue in, to negotiate in, to fall in love in. It reads like a list of achievements. Luana talks about it like a list of gifts.

The making of a global citizen

Her career began earlier than most. As a child she was already on screen, appearing on Nickelodeon and on Sweden’s Barnkanalen, learning the rhythm of a camera before she learned the rhythm of a classroom. Two decades later, that instinct is still what sets her apart. She does not perform for a lens, she talks to it.

Between then and now came a journalism degree, degrees in business and marketing, and the kind of moving that most people only do once. Each country added a language. Each language added a way of thinking.

“Every language you learn gives you a second personality,” she says. “I’m funnier in Portuguese. I’m more direct in Swedish. In English I’m the version of me that the world knows. They’re all true.”

Today she is one of Australia’s most-watched creators, with more than 3.3 million monthly views across her channels. She has fronted magazine covers and editorials. She has interviewed, hosted, reported and filmed her way across five continents.

“Home isn’t a place for me, it’s a feeling. And I’ve been lucky enough to find it in a lot of places.”

AMERICAN SUMMER

If you want to understand how Luana works, look at what she did this summer.

She spent the FIFA World Cup on the ground in the United States, creating content across three cities that could not be more different from one another: Los Angeles, Miami and New York. Two weeks moving, translating, creating and turning it around at speed, in a country hosting the largest tournament in the sport’s history.

It was her fourth World Cup. She covered Brazil in 2014, Russia in 2018 and Qatar in 2022, and she is already looking ahead to 2030, when the tournament comes to Europe.

“I love the USA, I really do. Miami is one of my favourite cities in the world and it always will be, I could live there. And then New York is New York. I’m a big city girl at heart, so I will always love New York. Shooting this cover for the magazine was something unique, it was my first time in Hollywood.”

The awards, and the one that is still to come

Luana is a four-time award-winning journalist and content creator, and the geography of those wins tells its own story. She has been recognised at Kensington Palace in London, at the Belmond Copacabana Palace in Rio de Janeiro, inside the British Parliament, and at NSW Parliament in Sydney.

The funny thing, she says, is that she still cannot quite believe any of it. Four awards in, and the disbelief has not worn off.

“I’m still the same little girl,” she says. “I’m still happy with the little things, that has never changed. But sometimes I think about the awards and I just smile to myself and think, that little girl with all those dreams, she came so far.”

There may be one more to come. Luana has been nominated for Personality of the Year at an international awards ceremony to be held at the Statue of Liberty in New York this September, and has been invited to attend, with details still being finalised.

Taking over Australia

“It’s funny how life works,” Luana says. “I’ve gone completely full circle.”

The circle starts with journalism. She trained and worked as a journalist, and then in Sweden, she watched something happen that most of the industry had not yet put a name to. Social media was exploding. Influencers were becoming a genuine commercial force. And brands, she could see, had no real idea how to work with either.

So she built an agency. Her first one. A mix of influencer management, events, and clients across hospitality and, memorably, tattoo studios. She spent her days working closely with creators, negotiating for them, placing them, building campaigns around them.

And then one day, watching all of it from the other side of the table, she had the thought that changed the entire trajectory of her career.

“I remember thinking, I can do that too,” she says.

She was already halfway there. Her travel blog had a real readership by then, built on the fact that she had been travelling since she was sixteen and had a habit of ending up somewhere nobody else was writing about. She visited Chernobyl. She built an igloo and slept in it. She went ice fishing. She watched the sun come up over Cappadocia from a hot air balloon. And on one gloriously unlikely night in Bulgaria, she found herself singing “Murder on the Dancefloor” with Sophie Ellis-Bextor.

“People weren’t reading me because I was a beautiful writer, they were reading me because I kept doing strange things,” she laughs. “I’d come back with a story nobody had heard before. That was the whole appeal.”

Moving into social media, then, felt less like a career change than a translation. So she made the decision most people would have called reckless. She shut the agency down, closed everything, and went full time as a creator.

That was 3.3 million monthly views ago.

Now the circle closes. This year Luana launched Beach House Agency, a boutique PR and influencer marketing agency in Sydney built specifically for beauty and wellness brands.

“I missed it,” she says. “I missed building things for other people. And Australia is the perfect place to do it.”

She is generous but firm about why. Australian PR, she argues, has genuine craft in the traditional disciplines, media relations, print, broadcast, the long-established machinery of coverage that this market does very well. What it has been slower to fully absorb is how completely the rest of the picture has moved.

“The world changed. Brands changed. The way people actually decide what to buy has changed entirely,” she says. “There is so much talent in this market and so much heritage, and I have real respect for it. I just think there’s room for something newer alongside it, the online part, the social part, the creator part. That’s the gap I want to fill.”

The model is boutique by design. Fewer clients, deeper relationships, campaigns built around actual audience behaviour rather than vanity metrics. Beauty and wellness, she argues, are the categories where authenticity is not a buzzword but a business requirement.

“You cannot fake a skincare result. You cannot fake how a treatment made you feel. The audience knows.”

The ambition is not modest. Beach House Agency is positioning itself to become the defining beauty and wellness agency in Australia, with a client roster already spanning clinics, skincare brands and wellness products.

An island, a church, and a dress

And then there is October.

After a Sydney civil ceremony in September, Luana will marry her fiancé on an exclusive island off the coast of Brazil, in a historic waterfront church, with a reception on the water and guests flying in from every one of the countries she has called home.

“I have been to fifty-five countries and the most beautiful place I have ever seen is a small island in my own state,” she laughs. “It took me the whole world to work that out.”

The plan is intentionally intimate. No stadium guest list, no spectacle.

“That is the part I cry about,” she says. “My whole life has been in pieces, in different countries, in different languages. For one weekend, on one island, all the pieces will be in the same room. I don’t think I’ll survive it.”

What comes next

Ask her what she wants from the next ten years and she does not say more followers, more countries, more awards.

“I want to build my little family,” she says. “I want to grow the agency. And I want to keep sharing my life with my community, because that is honestly what they are to me, family. Some of them have been with me since the very beginning. They have watched every phase of my life, every country I moved to, every version of me I’ve been. I don’t take that lightly.”

And you will see every step of the next chapter where she has always shared it, on her socials, at www.instagram.com/luanaostling. Though consider yourself warned: after October, she may well turn up under a new name.