Like his namesake, Migguel Anggelo reminds us that he is, quintessentially, a renaissance man. But in his work, the Man is carefully deconstructed, brought to life through an insatiable appetite to create without bounds, express poetically, provoke deeper thought, and to achieve the art of surprise.

Miami and Brooklyn-based and Venezuelan-born, Migguel Anggelo is a transdisciplinary performing artist. He invokes muses from art history, harnessing this lineage in effortlessly forward-thinking ways. He mines from his journeys as a Latino immigrant and a queer man: a fountain of source material to explore shared human experiences. He expresses himself through costume, musical composition, movement, and theater work, evoking the “showmanship of Desi Arnaz and the performance art of Klaus Nomi” (Theater Scene). His lyrical movement recalls Marcel Marceau, and his comic timing alludes to Charlie Chaplin. Marked by pop ambition, he nods towards the likes of David Bowie and Freddy Mercury. With unabashed theatricality, Migguel Anggelo straddles decades, genres, and cultures.

A series of coincidences propelled the life and career of Migguel Anggelo — a constant theme that created a backdrop for his artistic training and development. Growing up in a classically “macho” Venezuela, he stood out by choosing to study ballet. Unexpectedly, a casting director spotted Migguel’s talents in dancing, acting, and singing, and cast him as the starring role in the Latin American touring production of Pinocchio. This was the moment when Migguel discovered his transdisciplinary nature.

In his teen years, he took on notable roles for stage and television, before traveling to Germany to seek out opportunity and exposure to ancestral heritage. He turned to busking on the street to make ends meet. As if by chance, a voice student at the Conservatory of Music in Cologne spotted his vocal talent — he was later offered a scholarship to study classical voice, and the very rare countertenor register. On one visit back home from his studies (and on a whim) he tried out for the multinational-tour of the Latin American production of the Broadway musical Fame. Serendipity struck again, and Migguel was cast as one of the leading roles. After four and a half years of touring, he decided to leave the production, and moved to Miami. There, he fell out of performing and moved into pure survival mode. He turned to various jobs that kept a roof over his head. He learned English by watching The Golden Girls. He turned his creative attention to writing music and painting. He looked inward, having spent his youth on stage.

In Miami, Migguel Anggelo met designer and event producer, David Stark. The two met while Migguel was working as a salesclerk in a clothing store, per the usual coincidence that has personified his bevy of experiences. With David’s background in event design, the two became partners in production and partners in life. Migguel Anggelo moved to New York and began creating performance work that spoke to his multidisciplinary tendencies.

Never shying away from pushing creativity out of his comfort zone, Migguel Anggelo quickly developed the attention of artistic collaborators, curators, and new fans. Since that time, he has released two albums (Dónde Estará Matisse and La Casa Azul) and has been awarded residencies to develop new works at such esteemed institutions as MASS MoCA (North Adams, MA), Lincoln Center (New York City), the Miami Light Project (Miami, FL), the Kimmel Center for the Performing Arts (Philadelphia, PA) and BRIC (Brooklyn, NY). Migguel was named a 2020 New York Presenters Consortium resident artist as well as a 2019 Joe’s Pub Working Group resident and has been tapped to perform in festivals like the Public Theater’s Under the Radar, LPAC’s Rough Draft and Provincetown’s Afterglow. He has served as a cultural attaché, under the auspices of the U.S. State Department, in two separate 10-city tours of Russia.

Since then, Migguel Anggelo’s creative output has been unstoppable. As both fans and the media have agreed, “Anggelo forces his audiences to think and feel—and ultimately connects with them in a way that leaves an indelible and remarkable imprint” (The Broadway Blog).

In the last year, Migguel has been rigorously developing and performing his outrageously queer and gender-bending theatrical experience, LatinXoxo. In this work, Migguel Anggelo literally peels back an onion layer of personas, strip teasing “Latin lover” clichés, and reckoning with the tragic death of his homophobic and disapproving father. He has also developed the short film, Maid in America (2020) and the stage productions So Close: Love and Hate (2017), Another Son of Venezuela (2016-2015), and Welcome to La Misa, Baby (2016-2019).

He is currently developing English with an Accent, a hybrid dance-theater work of original music that explores self-realization through the eyes of an anthropomorphized, immigrant caterpillar. English with an Accent, is currently in workshop and will preview in Washington D.C. in April of 2022, co-presented by Washington Performing Arts and Gala Hispanic Theatre, with commissioning support from the Cultural Arts Center at Montgomery College as well as a Russell J. Efros Sprout Foundation award.

“Migguel Anggelo is a “larger than life personality” (The Broadway Blog), unfettered by rules, frankly, because he never knew there was a prescribed path that an artist should follow. As such, he creates truly moving works that are as surprising on stage as his serendipitous journey as an artist has been. He speaks to today’s multi-lingual, multi-generational audiences by passionately expressing the same longings for safety, freedom, love, joy and belonging that we all share, regardless of sexual orientation and country of origin. A boldly original artist, “Anggelo looks at the world as an ever-evolving canvas, a place to savor the senses, explore the beautiful and bizarre aspects of human nature and celebrate his Latin culture, heritage and art” (Latin Post). Follow him on Instagram.