Check Out Davi Santos’s Story

Today we’d like to introduce you to Davi Santos.

Hi Davi, thanks for joining us today. We’d love for you to start by introducing yourself.
I started sneaking out of my house in highschool to meet up with a boy a few months older than me who wanted to be a writer/director. He had an insane DVD library, and he’d introduce me to films by David Lynch, Greg Araki, Harmony Korine…then drive me back in his mom’s car from his house by the East River of Astoria, and I’d crawl into bed in time for one REM cycle before school. Becoming a cinephile meant watching movies critically and all kinds from everywhere and every period. When it came to the theatre, my father brought me to my first Broadway show, showed me musical movies and started that exposure. He made me a VHS library that I would lend out to my friends. My mom gave me a lot of love, showed me what it meant to be a positive person, to be silly, critical qualities. Growing up with a large extended family in the Brazilian-American community gave me a fundamental fabric of golden memories during my childhood. Yeah, my parents were divorced, but so were half of America’s. “Kids, it’s not your fault.” What happened to PSAs? Anyway my parents remained friends, that was great. Growing up in New York City in performing arts school starting at 12 meant all your friends were dancers, singers, actors, and art lovers. By freshman year of high school at LaGuardia, a day off meant pairing with a friend to hit a wing of the Metropolitan Museum of Art, or MoMA, to get a lil buzz going and spend the afternoon in the French Impressionist section of the museum. Sometimes alone, I’d go up to the different paintings and jot down the names of the artist, and just gaze at the work, spending a bunch of time in front of one piece. It would start to take on a life of its own. I loved it. So I was teaching myself art history and architecture, going to talks at the Museum of New York, symposiums for cognitive psychology at the CUNY Graduate Center; I was probably the only one there not in the graduate program. I just liked learning. I think all of it informed the work. Studying craft was important. Studying humans. And being human. Rejoicing at the good times, and strapping down to withstand all the trials and tribulations and bullshit. Being an immigrant kid in an America with a defunct immigration system taught me at a very young age about the corrosive relationship between our civic system and corporate lobbyists, a pandora’s box of preventable human misery waged by a relatively small bunch of bad apples with extreme wealth and even more apathy for the well being and happiness of the American public through their legions of masqueraded agents cosplaying as patriotic congressmen and judges. Identity politics at 11 gives a boy depth or at least character. Trains you to think philosophically when adults tell you you’re not Brazilian enough or you’re not American at all and it makes you ask: “What is identity? What makes a person ‘American’? What is the relationship between institutional recognition and years of experience and cultural participation? What does ‘law’ mean and does it make it right? What makes something ‘right’ versus just being ‘allowed’? Questions about ethics, morality, reality. My pot was being filled, sometimes painfully, on the juices of what made stories, the ideas that categorize society, the influence of power on the everyman, what it means to be human. Between all of that to just fall in love, have your heart broken, to laugh with a best friend, be shocked by betrayal, to embrace a pariah, be uplifted by genius, witness mental illness, get mad at social injustice, find ecstasy in belonging, experience triumph, reach for transcendence. Consistently watching world class art, shepherded by mentors across modalities bringing me to galas, fundraisers, cocktail parties. All the while learning my craft, climbing the so-called ranks, from the vice president of casting at ABC offering a meeting after my performance in the New York Fringe to leading my first network primetime show on CBS. I live bicoastally between New York City and Los Angeles. I still hang with that friend from Astoria who introduced me to indie cinema. He’s a writer now on the upcoming Fast and The Furious and instead of Astoria between us, there’s only Cahuenga Pass. The sun is setting over the golden domes of the Sikh temple outside my window in Los Feliz. We may never figure it all out, but that doesn’t mean we ever have to stop learning or telling the tales of what it’s all about.

Contact Info:

• Instagram: @davi_santos

Image Credits
Bobby Pache