Hi Justin, we’d love for you to start by introducing yourself.
Born in New York but raised in Rhode Island, my life has been pretty extraordinary though considered normal to most. I grew up mostly in a single-parent household with my mother, older brother and sister. My childhood consisted of me being a highly goofy but shy individual at a young age. I was bigger than most kid’s height and weight-wise, therefore I was bullied as many kids are nowadays. I didn’t know what I had going for me in life except for the simple fact that I liked sports and video games. Both of these outlets let me escape my reality for that short amount of time, leaving me immersed and open to create a world that was supportive and loving in the ways that I needed it. In elementary school, I had always been sort of a misfit due to the lack of me not being enough of one characteristic to be accepted by the different cultural cliques that society forms. This left me not having many real friends to connect with as I began to start skipping school.
When I would skip school, I had a best friend who I would link up with to hang out. When we weren’t playing video games or eating, we were tapping into the start of our creative side as human beings. We challenged each other to things like drawing, rapping, writing and dancing. For me personally, I liked all of the different art forms we were dabbling into but noticed that with dance, I just connected and felt more. Thats when my fascination began to kick in and I would skip school repeatedly to go over to my friend’s house and practice with him different dance styles and techniques wherever resources were available. There on and forward til high school, I had tried to balance my love for sports with social dancing at events or parties to really. Try to refine my skills with street dance as a young artist. Once making the transition to public high school, I realized that the system I was in wasn’t built for success or at least the type of success I saw for myself. I ended up transferring my freshman year from that public high school to a local art school that was doing auditions for incoming students.
After getting accepted into Jacqueline M. Walsh School for the Performing and Visual Arts, I began in depth training into the world of classical and modern dance styles. Around this same time, I had also begun to go to a non profit recreational center for artist, where I met some of my first mentors in dance who were Sokeo Ros & Edgar Viloria. These individuals and more were able to open my eyes to what it means to professionally impact lives through combining art with social work and outreach. Through this, I was able to really zone into the “why?” of what we do as artists and began developing a much more mature outlook on my passion for dance and where it could potentially take me. Junior year of high school, I ended up departed from that recreational center to follow my mentor Edgar to a new dance crew called Thr3e Live Dance Company. Here I was able to continue training with talent from all around the state of Rhode Island. It was here that I met iconic artists such as Dennis Leggett, Thomas Martino and Nikki Gyftopoulos. These artists helped me level up to the next step in my journey which was art college, where I attended The California Institute of the Arts. CalArts was a very unique and special time for me as it really pushed me past my limits of what I thought of myself and what I could accomplish.
In a nutshell, CalArts produced someone who’s self-aware of the many politics, systems and organizes moving around me. This consciousness, combined with the practice of art-making is what helps me stay away from the common label of just a dancer. I don’t go by the term dancer, I’m an artist. I know too much to let someone or something label me as a term that can be very narrow at times. I make art, whether it be through dance, drawing, film, sound, design or photography, I’m constantly in a state of creation. CalArts was an abundance of resources waiting to be tapped into and employed for its students, it isn’t just handed out freely, you have to go get it. Opportunities were granted to me there such as having the chance to be in contact with artists globally, from working with the likes of Nina Flagg, Rubberlegz, Rennie Harris to studying abroad in Paris at an international camp for art. After recently graduating in May of this year, I am now beginning to only grasp the surface of what the future has in store for me even in the midst of this pandemic.
Would you say it’s been a smooth road, and if not what are some of the biggest challenges you’ve faced along the way?
It definitely hasn’t been a smooth ride but I believe there’s beauty in the struggle. Growing up an inner-city youth, you deal with a variety of systemic problems. Looking into my single-parent household some of these issues involved low employments rates. This left my mother having to work multiple jobs to provide for three children, leaving children to watch other children and parent them. I remember nights with no hot water, so me and my sister would boil a pot of water, cool it off and then use it to bathe. Also, our environments around us were rough at times with neighborhoods filled with crime and hearing gunshots at night thinking that they were firecrackers going off. Parallel to this were the micro and macros of racism that people of color go through on a daily basis in our society. I think one of the biggest struggles that hit the hardest was reaching college and realizing that being left without a consistent father figure would pour out of me once I reached this point in my life.
For the four years, I was in college, I dealt with the traumas of my past and mental health. Though past traumas haunted me being a young male, isolated from all he’s known and then dropped off all the way across the country by himself to figure it out alone. It really challenged me to rediscover myself as a man, a person of spiritual faith and most of all as a human being for the better. Through this self-work, I was able to get a better understanding of the oppressive forces around me that had left me hopeless many times. This dark cloud tended to bleed through not only white washed society but through the art world as well. I struggled trying to make my voice heard for the voiceless individuals like myself and standing up to these very subtle ways of racism that were progressively pushed onto myself and countless other experiences as well. Through all the fight and turmoil, I was able to shape a proud version of myself that commands respect and love from myself and others around me.
Thanks for sharing that. So, maybe next you can tell us a bit more about you’re your work?
Most of my recent works have revolved around my community and countless other communities social and economical issues. I’ve reinforced topics of racism and police brutality over the years while also performing a solo at CalArts on the mental health of my generation. My goal as an artist is to be close to the community and challenge the way that an audience perceives and participates with its performer. Sometimes it’s not through dance even though those are heavily where my expertise lye. I also produce content through mediums like film, visual and graphic design and installations of live experiences that audiences often participate in. My family and background is deeply involved with social work so that aspect tends to cross over and influence my decisions for my work often.
I’m most known for Hip hop and street dance but I encourage opening the umbrella of what makes Hip hop its culture and how that can be used in various ways to engage with my audiences. I would say I’m most proud of when I was in Paris at the international camp, I was one of the only students to produce a Hip hop class that was packed out. We ended up taking the class outside of the studio and onto the streets of Paris and making it a global event of sharing lifestyles and backgrounds through movements which gave me a high off life as an artist. What sets me apart from other artists would be my ability to critically engage in conversations no matter how dense the topic. Alongside that would be my presence as a human being, artist and performer, I make sure that every time I step onto the stage that you are left feeling something and remembered.
What was your favorite childhood memory?
I don’t remember much of my childhood but one thing I’ll never forget is my 6th birthday party. I would confidently say that I’m a geek so I’m super into comic books, superheroes, anime, etc. So on this birthday, my family was throwing me a surprise birthday party and my uncle was supposed to dress up as spider man, who at the time was like my Santa Claus as a kid. Being the nosey kid I am, I was skeptical of the actual spider man making an appearance at my birthday so I had my doubts. When my family had arrived, I noticed that my uncle had arrived but disappeared and I always had used to be up his butt cause he was like my father figure. This lead to me creeping under one of our bedroom doors to find him suiting up as Spiderman. Now, if I can recall Peter Parker, who is spider man in the comic books is white so it was just a surprise that a ripped Puerto Rican man was coming to save the day. Never the less that day, I realized that superheroes can come in all colors, shapes and sizes. Also, they’re usually closer to you than you think and you are someone’s hero right now and forever.
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Image Credits
Rafael Hernandez, Lizzy Noriega, Nicholas Pacheco
