Meet Nicole Romine of Ecuador

Alright, so thank you so much for sharing your story and insight with our readers. To kick things off, can you tell us a bit about how you got started?
My path has never been a straight line; it has always been more like a slightly wobbly spiral. I began in the language of the body — dance — long before I understood what story really meant. I went into the world of professional dance and traveled extensively, which was profoundly important to me — learning new cultures, new languages, and discovering how wide the world really was.
In my early years I worked in Los Angeles as a professional dancer, first at Paramount Studios as a Solid Gold dancer, and later at MGM on the final season of the television series Fame. While still dancing professionally, I moved into choreography and production work.

At the same time, I was traveling just as far through books. I read constantly — classics like Dickens and Tolkien, and the wild, unsettling beauty of Kafka, whom I loved deeply. The Brontës, too — fierce, inward, and untamed. There are far too many to name. Those pages shaped my inner geography as surely as any city I walked through. I have always been, at heart, a devoted reader.
After many years onstage, I learned that it was the art of dance I loved — the work, the impossible chase for perfection — far more than the performance itself.

But even then, beneath the lights and the choreography, I was always listening for something quieter. I was drawn less to spectacle and more to meaning — to the invisible currents that move us, to the places where beauty and sorrow meet. Over time, that pull led me away from the industry and deeper into independent, cross-disciplinary creation: dance-theatre, writing, and visual art.

For many years I lived and worked far from the traditional centers of the arts, choosing instead a quieter life that allows for deep listening, long solitude, and sustained imagination. It is in that space that Moon was born — slowly, over many years — as a story, then a book, then a theatrical vision, and now as a series of small, handcrafted films.
Today, I have the gift of time — and it is truly a gift, a privilege. I feel untethered! It feels less like a destination and more like a threshold: no longer defined by institutions or titles, but by devotion to a single world, a single story, and the lifelong question of how we transform through love, loss, and dreaming. I am still, always, becoming.

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?
No — it definitely has not been smooth! I sometimes think of a marvelous older dancer who once said, “It was foolish to become a dancer, but I did it anyway.” That feels fairly accurate. The struggles along the way have been full of quiet sorrow, and it has been a long road. I have certainly been my own worst enemy, as they say. Like many independent artists, I have lived with uncertainty and scathing self-criticism as constant companions: financial instability, doubt, and that destructive question of “Why bother?” — which can be lethal. There were long stretches where it would have been far easier — and far more sensible — to stop.

There were also deeper, more personal obstacles. My inner world was, for a long time, a fantastical mess. Life often looked good on the outside, but the view from within was full of gnarly monsters. I eventually had to do the unglamorous, difficult work of deep diving — or as Annie Dillard once said, to “ride those monsters all the way down.” It was an inside job. And, because of that work, I learned how to trust my own voice even when it did not fit neatly into existing boxes, and how to keep creating even when the world seemed indifferent or distracted.

I never struggled with a lack of ideas — I struggled with the endurance required to protect them. Ideas are tender, fragile things. They need space to grow and become. This is not something our current culture values, and so many brilliant ideas vanish forever into the daily labor of survival. It is heartbreaking.

My current project, Moon, grew inside these constraints. It was not born of abundance, but of persistence. I made it in the margins of ordinary life, in stolen hours, in solitude, in seasons of doubt, and in moments of quiet, stubborn faith.
Looking back, I see that the challenges shaped not only the work, but the way I work: slowly, carefully, with reverence for the unseen and the unfinished. I would not wish the hardships on anyone — and yet I would not trade the depth they gave me either. They taught me how to listen, how to wait, and how to remain.

As you know, we’re big fans of you and your work. For our readers who might not be as familiar, what can you tell them about what you do?
At the simplest level, I am a storyteller who works across forms. My foundation is in dance — ballet — and I will always be a dancer. But over time my work has grown to include other ways of bringing my vision to life. I don’t specialize in one medium so much as in a way of working — slow, intuitive, interdisciplinary — where story leads and form follows.

At this moment, my primary focus is Moon — a world that has moved through many incarnations. It is not something I “produce” so much as something I tend. The work lives at the intersection of myth, memory, dream, and transformation, and it asks quiet but persistent questions about how we become who we are, and how we learn to let go of who we thought we were.

My intention has always been to inspire. As a director, as a creator, my greatest joy is when I see an artist unfold into their own truth and then summon the courage to share that beauty with the world. What an extraordinary moment that is.
What I am most proud of is not any single piece of work or any award, but those moments when my words or my work have touched another life. I have a magical box full of letters that I cherish far more than any award — a letter from a cameraman who worked on my first film Ing; a young girl in juvenile detention who boldly proclaimed that she was going to be a choreographer; a young dancer who finally saw how beautiful she was; music composed for Moon that was later used to accompany a film about the devastation of the war in Ukraine. These moments make every tear and every heartache worthwhile.

I am also proud that Moon was made without permission, without a market in mind, without guarantees — simply out of devotion. And love. Every day that I get to work on it, I love the characters, the world, the tender truth of it all. I continue to learn from the work itself — not least through this very adventurous plunge into AI.

What sets my work apart, I think, is its refusal to rush. I am not interested in producing content; I am interested in cultivating meaning. I work in layers, in silence, in listening. I trust what unfolds slowly. And in a culture that celebrates speed and spectacle, choosing slowness, tenderness, and depth has become — quietly — a form of resistance.

Networking and finding a mentor can have such a positive impact on one’s life and career. Any advice?
I’ve never found mentorship or connection through conventional networking. It has always arrived through relationship, through recognition, through listening. I have been profoundly shaped by a few key mentors — some I sought out deliberately, and some who appeared quietly at the edges of my life and stayed.

One was a painter, more than thirty years my senior, who carried wisdom with him like a sky full of stars. His soul was far larger than his body, and his way of being in the world taught me that art is not a career so much as a way of being. I was also guided by two brilliant and beautiful women — Ana Maria Sancho Sama and Debbie Edwards — who never told me what to do. Instead, they showed me pathways, modeled integrity and strength in their own lives, and sat with me even when I could not speak.

These three people helped give me the courage to make that plunge into the deep world within. Once, when I complained bitterly about having to do all this “work,” the painter responded with a very dry and very funny, “What else have you got to do?”

Equally important — though less often named as mentorship — were some of my students. They came to dance with wistful dreams, their tender hearts trembling with hope, their untamed beauty. They showed up to sweat, to fail, to try again, to fall, and to rise — all before the world had time to smooth their wildness and dim their passions. Those rare spirits taught me as much as I ever taught them. In many ways, the girl at the center of Moon is made of them — and I hold them still, close to my heart.

So my advice, if I have any, is this: don’t “network.” Instead, pay attention. Follow what moves you. Let yourself be a student to what you love. Seek out those whose way of being expands you — and when you find them, hang on to their coat-tails, even if those coats are made of stardust. Especially if they are made of stardust. Some of that will rub off on you.
And perhaps, in all of this wild, sometimes excruciatingly beautiful madness we call life, I have truly only done three things right:
I show up — often very much in spite of myself.
I am willing to learn.
I am willing to change.