Juan Carlos Cuadrado
Juan Carlos Cuadrado was born in Humacao, a fishing town in Puerto Rico sitting on the bluffs of the rainforest. As a child, he moved with his parents to Wilmington, Delaware, where he began growing up around creative communities, and engaging in local dance and theatre companies, such as the Delaware Theatre Ensemble. This combination of artistic training and community-based familial structure he experienced throughout the 1970s, both in Delaware and Philadelphia, Pennsylvania, shaped him to be the person he is today.
Cuadrado moved back to Puerto Rico to attend the Liceo de Arte y Tecnología, in San Juan, studying fashion and textile design during the 1980s. But soon thereafter, he returned to the USA, to do styling, research, and high-end retail in New York City.
He also channeled his energy into activism, participating since is teenage years in numerous demonstrations and protests for LGBTQI-rights and for ACT UP (AIDS Coalition to Unleash Power) both in New York and San Francisco. For the next decades, he lived between New York, San Francisco, Miami and Puerto Rico, working various roles in the art and fashion worlds and starting his own jewellery line in the process.
In 2016, Cuadrado moved to Berlin, where a creative love was rekindled, with the German capital bearing a trace of the energy of 1980s‘ New York City.
He acted in two of Zayne Armstrong’s recent films, Days (2022, in collaboration with Ellinor Aurora Aasgaard) and Boss (2018), and began modelling for commercial and editorial shoots as well as sociocultural campaigns, such as the Riccardo Simonetti Initiative. Most recently, Cuadrado was involved in developing, cowriting, and acting in Conversations on a Crosstown Algorithm by Doireann O’Malley (2022). At the Ballhaus Naunynstraße, Cuadrado can be seen as a performer in Flight of the Canaries (2023) and Amigues Adios (2026) by Bishop Black and as a panelist in Cooperating in Difference as part of the Black Berlin Black – Festivity festival.