Today we’d like to introduce you to Ethan Dunacusky-Cruz.
Hi Ethan, it’s an honor to have you on the platform. Thanks for taking the time to share your story with us – to start maybe you can share some of your backstory with our readers?
For me, it all started before I realized it did.
Growing up, I was heavily involved in sports. I was extremely competitive, but when I realized I probably wasn’t going to make it to the NBA, my goal became to work in sports media, ideally as an analyst on ESPN. I started learning everything I could about every sport, memorizing statistics and developing the personality I thought I’d need to be on television.
What I didn’t realize at the time was that there were already a lot of creative seeds being planted in me. Some of my earliest memories are of listening to albums with my mom, Kanye West’s Graduation, Lil Wayne’s Tha Carter III, Jeezy’s The Recession, Kendrick Lamar’s good kid, m.A.A.d city, and I slowly fell in love with music. Through different artists, that interest expanded into fashion and film. I remember watching the “Can’t Tell Me Nothing” music video and realizing how much you could communicate through aesthetics, clothing, visuals, and atmosphere. I became fascinated with the idea that you could create a feeling without having to say it outright.
From there, I started exploring different creative disciplines. I sketched and designed clothes and shoes, customized my own clothing, and eventually started learning more about designers, fabrics, and fashion as a whole. I became interested in photography and filmmaking too, using an old Canon PowerShot to make little homemade films and experiment with photography annd self portraits, and began to test different visual styles. I even learned to play the drums and got into music production.
But despite all of that, I still thought of myself primarily as an athlete and competitor. I didn’t really see the arts as something I could compete in, and honestly, I didn’t know they could be a career for me. I knew I wanted to be on TV, I just never saw acting as an option.
That changed toward the end of middle school. My older brother, Evan, was involved in theater, and one of his friends came to my middle school to recruit people. I had absolutely no interest in joining, but she eventually came up to me and told me I should try theater so I could “try to be better than my brother.” That immediately turned it into a competition, and I said yes.
Ironically, that decision completely changed my life. I started falling in love with acting, from my first show, The Addams Family, to my first lead role in The Elephant Man. I became completely immersed in the craft.
I eventually started acting on camera as well, collaborating on student films with my friend Matthew Dylan. We would brainstorm a concept and usually end up shooting the entire thing the next day. He was one of the people who made me fully realize that I could do this for the rest of my life.
Once I realized acting was something I could truly work at and compete in, I wanted to be the person who outworked everyone. That mentality pushed me to take the craft incredibly seriously. But beyond the competition, I began to realize there was something much deeper connecting me to acting. I felt like I had been given a gift for truly feeling and understanding love, pain, and every emotion in between. I felt the most human when I was performing. That was when I stopped seeing acting as something I wanted to do and started seeing it as something I was meant to do.
From there, I starred in a variety of shows and films leading up to college.
I went on to study Performance & Production at Texas State University, where I decided to fully double down on establishing myself as a serious artist. I made it my mission to work relentlessly. At the same time, college gave me the confidence and platform to explore the other creative interests I had developed over the years. I started modeling, making my own films, writing, and eventually doing photography and videography work for other people. From there, I also began creative directing.
College also gave me some incredible opportunities. I starred in my first feature film, Leads, directed by Bryan Poyser. I met my friend and collaborator Zaybeezy, for whom I now creative direct, and I was fortunate enough to meet so many incredible artists who I went on to work with.
Through all of that, I started thinking less about having to choose one discipline and more about how all of these different forms of creativity could exist together. I realized I didn’t have to sacrifice one interest to pursue another. In fact, each discipline could make me better at the others.
Today, I’m blessed to call myself a working artist: an actor, model, filmmaker, creative director, photographer, and writer, and hopefully a designer in the next few years.
In a lot of ways, I’m finally doing what I was unknowingly preparing myself to do all those years ago. I just took a much different route to get here than I ever expected.
I’m sure it wasn’t obstacle-free, but would you say the journey has been fairly smooth so far?
It definitely hasn’t been the smoothest road, but I think a lot of the obstacles I’ve faced have ultimately made me a better artist and gave a better understanding of who I am.
One of my biggest challenges as an actor has been learning how to separate myself from my characters. I’ve always been someone who feels things very intensely, and early on, I struggled with figuring out how to put those emotions into a performance without losing myself in them. How do I access something deeply emotional and make it belong to my character rather than to me? Therapy played a huge role in helping me understand that. Becoming more emotionally intelligent and more familiar with myself gave me the ability to explore difficult emotions without being consumed by them. I learned that knowing yourself deeply is actually one of the most important tools an actor can have.
Another challenge has been learning how to protect myself as an artist. There are moments in this industry where you can feel objectified, or where your vulnerability and emotional investment can become something other people expect access to. I had to learn that being passionate and giving everything to my art doesn’t mean I have to give everything of myself away. Finding a community of people I trust to create with has been a huge part of that, but so has learning to set boundaries and understand what I am and am not willing to sacrifice for my work.
I’ve also had to navigate the balance between artistic integrity and creating something that is marketable. As a multidisciplinary artist, there are always going to be pressures to make yourself easier to understand, package, or sell. I’m still learning how to navigate that, but I’ve become very intentional about making sure that growth never comes at the expense of my identity. I want to be able to evolve as an artist without losing the reason I started creating in the first place.
So no, it hasn’t been a smooth road. But I’m grateful for that. A lot of the obstacles I’ve faced have forced me to become more self-aware, more protective of my boundaries, and more confident in who I am as an artist.
Thanks for sharing that. So, maybe next you can tell us a bit more about your work?
I am a multidisciplinary artist with acting as the center of my creative life.
As an actor, I’ve had the opportunity to star as Ryan in Bryan Poyser’s feature film “Leads,” which premiered at the Tribeca Film Festival. I’ve also played roles including Vincent Van Gogh in “Vincent and Theo,” Scrooge in “A Christmas Carol,” Rothko in “Red,” Macbeth, and Dionysus in “The Bacchae.” Some of my most meaningful work includes Clint in my self-directed short “Blood On My Boots” and, most importantly, Monet Margiella in my original film “Mo’ Money Margiella Baby!,” created with Jordan Faniel.
“Mo’ Money Margiella Baby!” is the project I am most proud of. We wrapped filming in late May and finally finished the editing process earlier this September. We created it completely independently, with essentially no budget, and built the world around it ourselves. I starred in it while also contributing to the photography, visual art, promotional material, and overall creative direction. It represents the kind of artist I want to be: someone who doesn’t wait for permission, resources, or the perfect circumstances to create something ambitious. We simply believed in the idea enough to make it real. Conceptually, it is the most radical project I have ever done, and it is something I am very eager to share.
Outside of acting, I work extensively in creative direction, particularly with Zaybeezy, as well as with other musicians on photoshoots and music videos. I shoot studio portraits, landscapes, self-portraits, and branded photo and video work. I also model in both editorial and runway settings. All of these disciplines inform each other for me. I don’t see acting, photography, fashion, film, and visual art as separate worlds. They are different ways of telling the same stories I want to share.
What I am most proud of about my art as a whole is how vulnerable it allows me to be. Acting feels like the most honest reflection of who I am because it requires me to give myself completely to another person’s story. My favorite characters have been the ones that demanded the most of me emotionally and forced me to explore parts of the human experience that I may not otherwise have confronted.
I believe my strongest point as an actor is in dramatic and serious roles. I am drawn to characters with emotional complexity, internal conflict, and a real sense of humanity behind them. I enjoy exploring the darker, more vulnerable, and sometimes uncomfortable parts of a character, and I feel most at home when a role demands that I be emotionally honest and fully committed. Those are the performances where I feel I can give the most of myself while still completely transforming into someone else.
I think what ultimately sets me apart is a combination of my work ethic, my life experience, and the sheer breadth of my creative practice. I am relentless about my work. I take my art seriously, and I am willing to put an enormous amount of myself into it. Beyond ambition, I think having actually lived through difficult experiences, failures, relationships, loss, growth, and triumph has given me a deep curiosity about people. I am interested in what makes people contradictory, vulnerable, selfish, loving, destructive, beautiful, and human. But I think my biggest separator is that I’m not scared. I’m not bound by fear. I’m not afraid to give all of myself to this. I’m not afraid to fail, it doesn’t ever cross my mind.
I have a tremendous amount of confidence in what I can become. I believe I was made for this, that there’s no one better suited for this than me, but I also know that belief has to be backed up by work. I study my craft, I create constantly, and I push myself to become better. I want to be an artist who cannot be confined to one medium or one definition. Whether I am acting, directing, photographing, modeling, designing, or creating visual art, I want the work to feel unmistakably mine.
More than anything, I want to make work that feels alive. I want to take risks, make people feel something, and create things that would not exist if I had not decided to make them.
What sort of changes are you expecting over the next 5-10 years?
Over the next five to ten years, I see the creative industries becoming increasingly interdisciplinary and increasingly driven by individual artists. I think we are moving toward a period where the lines between film, music, fashion, design, visual art, etc… become even less defined. Artists are going to have more control over the worlds they create, and I think audiences are going to become more interested in artists who have a distinct visual identity and a point of view that feels completely their own. Humanity needs to show through the art to combat AI.
I see myself in New York during that period, working with Jordan to turn “Mo’ Money Margiella Baby!” into a feature film while continuing to make as many features and shorts together as we can. I also see myself continuing to create my own independent projects. There will definitely be a stronger focus on acting. I am already SAG-AFTRA eligible, and by then I hope to be consistently booking union work and building a substantial body of film and television work.
I also see myself continuing to build with Zaybeezy. We have already put so much work into getting to this point, and with the way his EPs and album have been developing, I see us creating entire worlds around his music and my visuals for a long time. I want to expand that kind of collaboration to other artists I admire as well. I want to stay connected to the next generation because I am still a young artist myself, and I want to help bridge the next generation with the current and past generations of artists.
I also see myself expanding further into design. I could see myself going to graduate school, but if I do, I would want to study design rather than film. I want to fully explore that medium and eventually have my hand in designing clothing not only for myself, but for the artists I work with. I want to explore music merchandise, costumes, clothing, and innovative forms of fashion that can exist within the worlds we create.
More broadly, I think we are heading toward an artistic renaissance. The messages behind creative work are becoming more connected to the times we live in, and I think people are going to become increasingly willing to use art as a statement about who they are, what they believe, and how they see the world. Art has always been political, but especially now, we have seen artists find increasingly beautiful, unconventional, and powerful ways to express what they see and feel, whether through abstraction, realism, performance, or any other medium, while still making their messages direct and unmistakable. I think the years ahead will only make that art more blunt, more honest, and more willing to say the things we are all thinking and feeling but may not know how to articulate ourselves. I see art becoming less concerned with capitalism and entertainment for entertainment’s sake and more concerned with provoking thought, challenging what we accept, and becoming a vehicle for cultural change and revolution. I want to be at the forefront of that movement.
I also just want to see artists become less afraid of being ambitious, eccentric, confident, or even a little pretentious. I think there is value in taking yourself and your art seriously. I want people to give themselves permission to have an ego about their work, talk their shit, take risks, and give everything they have to what they create. Confidence can be contagious, and I want my work and my approach to art to inspire other people to have that same confidence in themselves.
I see the next five to ten years as a period of working relentlessly, leading creatively, and constantly trying to push the boundaries of what I can do. I want to create the visual blueprint rather than follow one. And when someone inevitably takes inspiration from it, I want my response to be to create another one. I want to keep moving forward.
Ultimately, I don’t just want to participate in the future of the arts. I want to help shape what that future looks like.
Contact Info:
- Instagram: https://www.instagram.com/ethan_cruz10 | https://www.instagram.com/reel/DcHnqm2MNZY/ | https://www.instagram.com/cruxxifyme_
- LinkedIn: https://www.linkedin.com/in/ethan-dunacusky-97171a408
- Youtube: https://youtube.com/@ethancruz10
- Email: ethan.cruz.dunacusky@gmail.com
