Today we’d like to introduce you to Sayda Trujillo.
Hi Sayda, so excited to have you on the platform. So, before we get into questions about your work life, maybe you can bring our readers up to speed on your story and how you got to where you are today.
Daughter of Guatemalan immigrants, I was born in Montreal, Canada, and grew up in Montreal, Guatemala, and LA in Boyle Heights. I started to study theatre at Plaza de la Raza in Lincoln Heights when I was 14 years old…it changed my life. I am now a theatre-maker, actress, and educator, professor at Cal Poly Pomona department of Theatre and New Dance. I write and perform my own work. www.saydateatrera.com
Can you talk to us a bit about the challenges and lessons you’ve learned along the way? Looking back, would you say it’s been easy or smooth in retrospect?
Challenges & Struggles: Learning a new language, studying theatre when you come from a working immigrant family can be lonely and feel like you’re uprooting yourself from your own. Being a woman of color and studying and working in primarily white institutions. Financially, it has been challenging to make a living as a theatre-maker.
Thanks – so, what else should our readers know about your work and what you’re currently focused on?
I am theatre-maker & storyteller, this means I write and perform my own plays. I have 4 solo shows that have been performed nationally and internationally. I am an expert on the Voice and Physical Theatre–for voice, this means–I teach voice production, I sing, and I write about identity and the power of our voice. I work with communities around the world using theatre as a tool for social transformation. For Physical Theatre, this means that I am an expert on physical forms of theatre, like clown and commedia dell arte, but mainly, it means that the body is the language through which stories are told.
I am known as a solo performer and educator who works around the world using theatre for empowerment and transformation.
I am most proud of being a storyteller who listens.
What sets me apart from others is my experience crossing borders and the way that I am exploring belonging.
Networking and finding a mentor can have such a positive impact on one’s life and career. Any advice?
To find your mentors, you have to trust yourself, and you have to listen and do what you love—when you do that, you come across others who are doing it too and who have been doing it for a long time. My advice is to be genuinely interested, don’t think of mentors as people who give you things…but as people you listen to, and ask questions to, and that you engage with, it is not a one-way street, your mentors will see you as a mentor too. To connect to mentors, we must embrace our fears and not push those fears away.
Contact Info:
- Website: www.saydateatrera.com
- Instagram: saydaqp
- Facebook: Sayda Trujillo
Image Credits
Eric Neil Gutierrez
Ben Rivers
