Student Blogger: Eva Viciana

We are all influencers. Crazy, right? We grew up watching our favorite idols, and now we’re slowly becoming our own, not as a title, but as a condition of the field. Influence isn’t something you step into anymore

Nostalgia is a flawed word, just under ten letters, as if it almost lands somewhere complete but stops short. In the performing arts, it operates less as emotion and more as evaluation.

As we make our way through the lucky month of March, I keep thinking about the way people talk about luck in the arts, where the language of luck seems to follow almost every success story.

Women’s History Month has always made me slow down a little. Women’s History Month always makes me pause and think about how much of the world we move through today was shaped by the choices, persistence, and courage of women who came long before us.

We talk often about loving the arts, but far less about how that love is sustained over time. In conversations about theatre, devotion is usually framed through sacrifice: long hours, constant availability, the unspoken expectations.

One year ago, I published my first article with BroadwayWorld without fully understanding what that small act would come to mean to me.

What does history feel like before it knows what it will become? That question stayed with me over a winter trip to New York, where Liberation, Chess, and Ragtime began to connect in ways I didn’t expect.

So, you’re ambitious. January loves that about you. It shows up with planners, declarations, fresh starts, and the reassuring idea that if you define something clearly enough, it will fall into place.

As 2025 comes to a close, I’ve noticed that the instinct to look ahead feels less urgent than the need to pause. Broadway doesn’t move in neat yearly cycles the way we often pretend it does.

Audition season will arrive soon enough. When it does, what matters isn’t how much you pushed yourself beforehand, but whether you arrive with enough steadiness to respond rather than react. 

This season always pushes the word gratitude back into every conversation, but in the arts, it often lands in more complicated ways. The work does not slow just because it is a holiday.

Something can live on a stage, on a movie screen, or on a phone in someone’s hand, and somehow it is still the same thing and not the same thing at all.

I grew up surrounded by music, so it has always been part of how I understand the world. When everything else feels scattered, music returns like something constant beneath the noise, reminding you that you are not lost.

Some work never finishes. You begin with direction and drive, and then one day it stops. The idea loses shape, time runs out, or your focus moves somewhere new. You set it aside and move on, yet it lingers with you.

The arts ask us to hold two truths at once. Creativity depends on freedom, on the willingness to experiment, to laugh, to take risks without fear. Yet lasting work also demands discipline, structure, and commitment.

The creative path belongs to us, and no technology can claim it. Creation is the lived process of starting with nothing and discovering something you did not know you could make, and that path will always be human.

Art has always been at the center of my life. It is my first and deepest love. I even got a tattoo that reads “art” because that word sums up what I live for. It represents the way I want to grow, create, and stay connected to what gives me purpose.

Being back at school, away from the fast pace of New York City, gives me a daily opportunity to take small, personal risks. I treat college as my experimental space, a place to challenge myself, push beyond comfort zones, and discover what I am truly capable of. By the time I graduate, I want to be someone who embraces uncertainty, steps into the unknown without hesitation, and carries that mindset into the arts I love.

I sip on my morning coffee and think about how closely creativity is tied to my identity. It’s not just something we do. It’s something we are. As artists, the art we make is part of us. The ideas, the projects, the constant urge to build or express do not wait for scheduled hours.

When I go to the theatre, I don’t just watch the performance. I watch the people around me. It’s not out of curiosity or judgment, but from a quiet fascination with how we each engage with the story in our own way.