We caught up with the brilliant and insightful Sonia iris Lozada a few weeks ago and have shared our conversation below.
Sonia iris, looking forward to hearing all of your stories today. Did you always know you wanted to pursue a creative or artistic career? When did you first know?
Entertainment has always been my passion. My mom’s side of the family had a strong musical background, and our home was always filled with singing and dancing. In my younger years, I dreamed of becoming a pop singer, but fate led me down a different path. A friend who couldn’t leave his house due to illness offered to teach me acting, and I eagerly accepted the opportunity. Prior to this, I had studied fashion design, as I didn’t think acting would bring in enough money. But with my friend’s guidance, I eventually decided to pursue an acting career and enrolled in Ed Kaye’Martin’s pre-admittance workshop for aspiring actors. From there, I moved on to his main workshop and was pleasantly surprised to see many familiar faces from TV and film. It hasn’t been an easy journey – there were times when I wanted to give up due to the struggles of getting headshots, working on student films, and finding an agent (or multiple agents) for different types of roles. Singing has always been a passion of mine, even though my dreams of becoming a pop star didn’t come true. Instead, I found joy in performing in musicals, where I could use all of my talents – acting, singing, and dancing. However, I persevered and proud of the vast acting credits and opportunities. including a recurring role on the Amazon series Bosch Legacy. While acquiring many credits and working in the industry, I am truly grateful for how far I’ve come in this challenging and rewarding journey.
As always, we appreciate you sharing your insights and we’ve got a few more questions for you, but before we get to all of that can you take a minute to introduce yourself and give our readers some of your back background and context?
In addition to my acting career, I am also a poet with four published books. I am currently working on the fourth installment of my Inspire Me Series. Poetry, singing, and acting have all been important parts of my life since childhood. Growing up in two different cultures, poetry was my escape from the realities of the outside world. I would write and then hide my poems away in a drawer. However, in 2017, I took a leap and self-published my first book, Inspire Me: Raw, which delves into raw emotions. My editor Ruben Rodriguez has written a bio for me, which can be found below.
Fostering truth and beauty in all its various modes—through riveting determination on stage and screen, through harmony of perspectives in podcasts, through deft eloquence of words on the poetic page—Sonia Iris Lozada inspires, dreams, fascinates, cracks a smile, and spurs the moment with verse and wit.
Here we have an actor with an eye toward the real in the unreal, an actor who accentuates the subtlety of life in her various roles. With numerous acting credits across a range of genres, Sonia enlivens characters out of scripts into full-bodied beings and lures in the viewer at the same instant. Her roots dig deep through her parents to Puerto Rico and spread to the streets of Chicago where she was born. She brings this mixture of culture into a mixture of styles, humor with drama, a smile with a keen gaze, and steady timing in works such as Life Upside Down, season two of Bosch Legacy, the award-winning short Love in Time of Pandemic, Out of the Wild, and Expired. Her dynamism is electric.
Sonia lives the many lives of the soul: out of one’s self-imposed limits, she discerns potential. Through her assorted poetry collections—Inspire me Series: Book 1 & 2 (2022), Inspire Me: Perception (2019), Follow Akashic Dreaming Through Time (2019), and Inspire Me: Raw (2017) Sonia weaves grace from loss, honesty from love, delicacy from the torn fabric of memory, and a persevering joy in the face of doubts. Her poems convey a broad spectrum of life’s yearnings. Yet the lilt of her voice never lapses: from the cascading effect of Spanish alongside English to the perceptive lessons of one’s soul in concert with one’s living, these poems dance to the tune of life’s multi-layered vibrations and never miss a step. Her forthcoming poetry collection, the triumphant third in the series, will bring the raw past and the perceptive eye toward a new vision: Inspire Me: Awakening Dreams.
After accomplishing so much in her diverse expressions of art, Sonia sought to cultivate the expressions of others in an exploratory mode. Through her Poetic Resurrection Podcast she speaks to those who have learned life’s hard lessons through experience, art, and teaching. These lessons become conversations of strength and acceptance, of seeing the long-term effects of beliefs on behaviors (Season 1), of essence in writing and living (Season 2), of the spectrum of life’s plentiful hues (Season 3), of self-actualization (Season 4), and of perseverance (Season 5), Season 6 is Literary Fiction. These lessons are not singular, certain, or prescribed; these are frames of thinking and thus handholds of living. In these podcasts you will find laughter and tears, hopes and doubts, ideals and realities—but always sustaining, always living, always a current of inward focus and outward breathing. These conversations are succor for life’s pains, and you will hear Sonia smile, again and again, through art, through life, through the prosodic music of words.
Is there something you think non-creatives will struggle to understand about your journey as a creative?
One of the most frequently asked questions I receive is how I am able to perform emotional scenes with people watching. When acting, you are fully immersed in the character and the storyline – the crew is not visible. Some helpful phrases I’ve heard are “acting is being private in public” and “comedy is serious.” It’s important to not play for laughs, but rather approach it seriously. Another common question is how I am able to act alongside famous actors without getting nervous. In reality, my nerves stem from making sure I hit my marks and remember my lines. Of course, it’s exciting to work with talented individuals, but at the end of the day, it is a job and professionalism is key. Here’s a quick look at my process for booking a TV show:
1. My agent secures an audition for me.
2. I study the script without attaching a specific character to it, as they may change during the audition process.
3. If booked, I receive call sheets and final scripts.
4. I attend wardrobe fittings.
5. On set, I go through hair and makeup before shooting, usually two hours prior.
6. Once finished with my scene(s), I sign out.
The air date for the show may not be announced until several months later, and for films, it could take up to a year after filming to be released.
Learning and unlearning are both critical parts of growth – can you share a story of a time when you had to unlearn a lesson?
As performers, we often idealize our craft as purely artistic, but the truth is, it’s also a business. I’ve been hired for gigs and then abruptly replaced by a more famous actor, not because of any fault of my own, but simply because producers decided it would bring in bigger audiences. There have been times when my role in a production has been cut entirely after I was already cast, or even after I’d performed, due to time constraints. It’s disheartening, but unfortunately, this is the nature of the industry. It took me some time to come to terms with the fact that acting is just one aspect of working in the entertainment world.
Contact Info:
- Website: https://sonialozada.com/
- Instagram: @poeticsonia
- Facebook: https://www.facebook.com/SoniaLozada.Film.TV
- Linkedin: https://www.linkedin.com/in/sonia-lozada-09423611/
- Youtube: https://www.youtube.com/channel/UCAJgk3HMADdbg3iIyzHlH9A
- Other: YouTube channel is being worked on.https://www.youtube.com/@soniairislozada2688 Check out the poetry podcast website Poetic Resurrection at: https://poeticresurrection.com/ The entertainment podcast called Overheard.at.Chica’s.Café at https://overheardatchicascafe.com
Image Credits
Mark Attenberry Ken Sawyer Sonia Iris Lozada Denise Sanchez