Meet Cacia LaCount of WiredbyCacia in North Hollywood

Today we’d like to introduce you to Cacia LaCount.

Cacia, please share your story with us. How did you get to where you are today?
I am a professional dancer/choreographer, visual artist/jewelry maker, and web/graphic designer!

I was born in Boston, Massachusetts. As a kid, I was always painting/drawing, making my own clothes and jewelry, constantly making a mess. I wanted to grow up to be an artist from as early as I can remember. I was raised by two of the most creative people I know-my parents. My mom went to school for fashion design and was always making clothes, reupholstering our couch by hand, making pillows, painting, knitting, etc. in her free time, and my dad makes stone and wire sculptures as well as drawings and paintings. Neither of them had the opportunities to make money from their passions, but always instilled their love of art on me. My older brother started a theater company in Boston that I got to watch grow into a successful and important part of the Boston art and theater community. Whenever I think about my story as a dancer and an artist, my family is always what inspires and continues to ignite me.

I started dancing at the age of 5 years old, training intensely in classical ballet and modern throughout my childhood. I had a dance teacher who saw my growth in ballet class and encouraged me to pursue dance as a career. I quickly became obsessed with finding my path in this world. Walnut Hill School for the Arts was a boarding high school for performing artists in my hometown of Natick, Ma. I attended their after school community academy for younger kids ages 5-13, but the high school was difficult to get into and very expensive. During my freshman year of high school at the public school in my town, I secretly applied to Walnut Hill without my parent’s knowledge- knowing full well, we couldn’t afford the tuition. I ended up being accepted on scholarship and attended for the rest of high school. While at Walnut Hill, I attended summer dance intensives at The Joffrey Ballet School, Chautauqua Institute, The Juilliard School and San Francisco Conservatory.

I then attended Purchase College in upstate New York for a year before transferring to The Boston Conservatory and moving back to Massachusetts, where I received my Bachelor of Fine Art in Dance Performance. While at the Conservatory, as much as I felt dance was my focus, I still had a craving for making visual art. They offered a dance film class my junior year that gave an intro on film-making from a dance perspective. I was in love with the idea that I could make visual art using dance and started making little films with my friends. My dad bought me a camera for my birthday a year later. My friends from college still joke about all the crazy things I’d ask them to do for my films, not limited to, dancing half-naked on a chair with their limbs poking through a poster board in the alley of my apartment in the middle of winter, or meeting me downtown in the train station at 5 am to shoot when no one was around.

After I graduated school, I really was sort of lost. I got a job working front desk at a boutique hotel in the Fenway area in Boston. While at the hotel, my boss noticed my talent for drawing and design and asked me to do a couple of graphic design jobs for the hotel. Before I knew it, I was promoted to working as a marketing coordinator of the hotel, without any marketing degree.

While in Boston, I started working with Heather Stewart, a choreographer, and now one of my good friends and mentors-I owe a lot to this amazing lady. I stayed in Boston and continued to work with her, excited about the work we were creating and also joined Boston Dance Theater (BDT), a new repertory company in Boston in 2017 as a dancer and marketing supervisor for the company.

I moved to Los Angeles in September of 2018 and joined Ate9 Dance Company as an apprentice for their 2018-2019 season. I am currently dancing freelance around Los Angeles and running my small handmade jewelry business called WiredbyCacia, where I sell earrings, necklaces, pins, and prints!

Has it been a smooth road?
No, it hasn’t been a smooth road. Especially with dance. It’s one of the most rewarding fields to be in, but the sacrifices you make to get there can really bring you down. I think for me, the biggest challenge has been sustaining myself financially. It’s really easy when you love what you do, to it for free sometimes for an opportunity or to do it for little money. I’ve definitely done a ton of work for free, and that can be hard to justify to yourself at the end of the day when you’ve put in so much training and spent your whole life honing your skill. It’s all about knowing your worth and being able to ask for the value you deserve.

Another challenge I have found in my career as an artist and dancer is struggling with anxiety and depression, especially when your ‘e struggling financially. I don’t think we talk about mental health enough still, especially in the dance community. It can be hard, specifically with social media, to see all of the success of your friends and colleagues when you might be going through a dry period in your career or lack of motivation. Freelancing especially can be so much about self-motivation and anxiety/depression has definitely been a roadblock at times.

WiredbyCacia, my jewelry business, sort of came out of this. I’ve always used visual art as a way to escape and heal, and during a time I was doing a lot of dance but struggling financially. It has been a great way to supplement my income and also has re-inspired me to the possibilities of being a multi-dimensional artist.

So let’s switch gears a bit and go into the WiredbyCacia story. Tell us more about the business.
WiredbyCacia is a collection of handmade earrings, necklaces, pins, and prints of my illustrations!

I started to make jewelry to take my mind elsewhere and also make some extra money. I started by making jewelry of faces inspired by some of my drawings and people really liked them. Now I make all sorts of designs, including, middle fingers, boobs, and roses. I like to draw with pen, and I really love line drawings. My mom went to school briefly for fashion design and always had fashion illustration books and dress patterns around the house. I loved the style of the drawings in old fashion designs and would always try to replicate that essence. I draw a lot of faces, warped, and funny sometimes, and I like to emulate that in my jewelry.

I think what makes WiredbyCacia unique is that everything is custom made! When you order something from me, usually I have a conversation with the customer about what they want and make it unique to them. Sometimes people just ask me if I can make something specific, and I try to be creative and make something unique. That’s how the boob earrings came to be- they were a custom order from a friend- it took me a week just to figure out how I would make nipples!

It’s also really important to me that my jewelry and art is really accessible and affordable. Gold and silver jewelry brands and businesses always have very posh and elegant branding, and I wanted WiredbyCacia to have a very DIY, funky, and colorful feel to it. All of my jewelry and art is under $30 because I want it to be accessible to everyone, while still being able to make some money. I love buying art and crafts from other artists but can’t always afford to, and I know a lot of other artists can’t as well, so sometimes we will trade crafts, and I love that.

What are your plans for the future? What are you looking forward to or planning for – any big changes?
I hope to go to grad school sometime in the next 5-10 years and would love to study jewelry-making and continue my studies as a dancer/choreographer. I would like to dance and perform as long as I can, and will go wherever the jobs and opportunities take me. I’m not much of a planner, so I like to just see follow things as they come. Moving to LA has opened my mind to the commercial dance world which I hadn’t had any experience in before moving, so I’d like to dabble in that while I’m here. I hope to travel to Europe in the next five years, dancing or choreographing and would love to explore the dance communities there as well.

In terms of WiredbyCacia, I hope to have a living situation where I could have a studio to make jewelry in- and maybe a partner to help make more! I’d like to be able to expand the business, selling in shops, more markets and to more online spaces as well. I love collaboration, so I’d love to collaborate with more artists in the future!

Contact Info:

• Website: www.cacialacount.com
• Email: cacia.lacount@gmail.com
• Instagram: @wiredbycacia, @cacialacount
• Other: etsy.com/shop/wiredbycacia

Image Credit:
Travis Hayes
Josh Rose
Taner Tumkaya
Djeneba Aduayum

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