The heart of our mission at VoyageLA is to find the amazing souls that breathe life into our city. In recent weeks we’ve had the privilege to connect with some of West LA’s finest artists, creatives, entrepreneurs and rabble-rousers and we can’t begin to express how impressed we are with our city’s incredibly deep talent pool. Check out The Valley’s rising stars below.
Erick Tran
The life of Erick Tran is an inspiring story of perseverance, passion, and creativity. Born and raised in Los Angeles to immigrant parents from Guatemala and Vietnam, Erick showed an early talent for art and a love for cartoons and video games. Despite facing challenges and struggles in his teenage years, he took his passion for animation seriously and pursued it at the age of 17, starting work on the iconic TV show, The Simpsons just two days after graduating from high school. Despite being rejected from all major art schools, Erick rose through the ranks of the animation industry, becoming an assistant director in 2002 and an animation supervisor on The Simpsons Movie in 2006. Read more>>
Michael Cruthird
I started working out at an incredibly young age. Born and raised in Boston, my parents moved us out of the city and into the suburbs when I was eight years old. We moved into a 3-family house or apartment building. Not long after we moved in, I was introduced to weight training by two older teenage boys who lived in one of the units. They offered to show me and my older brother how to “pump iron”. Of course, we didn’t know what that was initially, but I found out in short order what is was and I immediately realized that I couldn’t get enough of it! Read more>>
Rudy Zamora
Since I was young, I’ve felt that I’ve always had a creative bone. I pursued painting and art when I was a child then as an adolescent I was heavily invested into music to the point that me and a few of my high school buddies started a band. So grasping photography was very natural for me. Of course, my photos weren’t the best when I first started but as I grew comfortable with my camera and the way I took photos, I developed a certain style and technique with the way I photograph. I started doing photography as a hobby in 2018 and it wasn’t until 2021 that I decided that I wanted to make this hobby that I loved into something more and into a business. Read more>>
DPAK
I grew up in Maryland a first-generation Indian-American, born in Baltimore and growing up in a small town called Columbia, Maryland, not too far from Washington, DC. My parents were from Bangalore, India, in South India. They were very highly skilled musicians as a hobby, but my dad was brilliant in school in many subjects, ranking very highly at the highly renowned Indian university IIT (Indian Institute of Technology) and then coming to the US to pursue his graduate studies, getting a Ph.D. in electrical engineering. He later joined NASA, being there for nearly 50 years now in a very high position as a part of the EOS DIS project, creating systems for NASA for data archival that has been effective now for decades. Read more>>
