ROSE & IVY Introducing November Starring Aria Mia Loberti

Aria is wearing a Versace dress; Privé Revaux sunglasses.

Aria is wearing a With Jean dress; Lena Hoschek coat; Dinosaur designs earrings and rings.

It is so great to meet you aria! You have accomplished so much through education, advocacy, and now acting. But I’d love to ask what you dreamed about being when you were younger. I feel like our essence stays with us through adulthood.

It is something that my parents and I talk about all of the time. When I was younger, I had my list of things. I trained classically and intensively as a ballerina but I also said I wanted to be the president (laughs). I was a slightly conflicted child in that sense, but I knew I wanted to create art and that art had power. In my brain that’s what the president did, he got on TV and told stories. I am spoiled because I grew up with Obama who was a great storyteller. But if you asked anyone in my family they would say I was supposed to be an actress, which is funny I because when I got to college, I said I was going to be a scientist. I have an unusual memory where I can listen to something once or twice and I will memorize it. As a kid, I would listen to a lot of musicals or movies and I would memorize them. I would go in my backyard and put on a one-woman version of them all. God bless my family because when there was a holiday or a wedding, I would force everyone to deal with that (laughs), and then it died. It died when I got to be about seven or eight.

When you realize you have something that is different or sets you apart from people that means you don’t have a place in society. I thought, well, there is no way for me ever to do that or follow that dream so I told myself I was never going to act again. I wasn’t going to involve myself in theater and I wasn’t going to think about it, instead I would focus on dance. I’d do so in a way that was for myself. I’d focus my energy on school because all people seemed to care about was that I was smart. They didn’t seem to care about me. It’s interesting because I think any kid from a historically marginalized identity has a similar story. You have that talk with your parents where they say, people treat you differently and that can be unsafe for you, but you have to be realistic about entering into the real world. For me, it was giving up any hope of becoming a storyteller and now I get to be here which is kind of unreal.

Thank you so much for sharing. It’s a full-circle story, it gives me the chills! I’d love to talk about defining moments because those times can propel you forward. My own story was when I was diagnosed with MS. I didn’t want to be defined by a new reality.

I think about people like that who have a moment in their life where something radically changes and they have to overcome something. I think that can give a lot of people hope. The interesting thing is that I was born with my eye condition so it didn’t matter to me that much. It didn’t impact me any more than someone embracing their culture. I am Italian-American and I have traditions with my family. I also have traditions I follow because they are embraced by the blind community.

Kids are amazing because they understand that the world is different because it’s beautiful. Every individual is special, unique, and has something to offer. What makes you different than the person next to you, say they have beautiful blonde banana curls or they use a white cane, those are things to be interested and engaged with or can just be shrugged off. But they learn from adults that certain types of differences are good and certain types of differences are bad. I know when I was around six or seven, the teachers, who were my main abusers, were teaching my fellow classmates to be cruel or discriminatory or treat someone like me less than. They didn’t know that until they were taught that. I always think of that as a defining moment when you have power—over a classroom of 30 kids, or power over 300 million Netflix viewers—to change a definition of something, it’s what you do with that that matters. It’s not about you, it’s about everyone who might share that with you. I think that was a big moment for me to get to that level of understanding of sitting in school as a little kid and understanding that it is taught, it’s not human nature. I was then pulled out of school and home-schooled.

The second thing is getting my guide dog, Ingrid, who is a symbol for me. In any environment that I was in, if someone realized I was low vision, I would try to hide because I came from a background of bullying and abuse in school. I was always afraid it was going to happen again, so I would hide those parts of my identity. No one really knew I was low vision. I would ask for accommodations but they were private. But then I got to college and I thought it would be helpful if it would be easy for me to get around and get to my classes. I see everyone around me being comfortable, being themselves, and embracing their cultures and I wanted to embrace mine. I had great cane skills, but I was very cautious about expressing that to anybody because I didn’t want to go back to what I had experienced in elementary school.

Aria is wearing a Bora Aksu coat.

I am so sorry you had to go through that. I try to think of the best when it comes to humans, but it is hard when you hear stories like that. SOMETIMES I just don’t understand.

I think it’s a few things, people get scared when they don’t know what to do, which is a defense mechanism. I think people look at an innocent kid who can’t fight back and some part of them thinks they can make a part of them feel better and go on some power trip. When I got my dog, after the summer of my freshman year in college, people would know because she wears a sign. It was a really big step for me to feel safe, independent, and free and embrace that part of my identity through a dog, which is different from a cane. When I got her everyone was so interested in this dog. People just thought it was so cool that when you are sensitive to light, you can train your dog to walk in the shade. It became part of a celebration. I had been celebrating it quietly and on my own and I knew that it mattered. I wanted things to change; I just didn’t take that step and then all of a sudden you have a way in with people. I think that was really cool.

Meet Ingrid, Aria’s guide dog.

The journey of finding your voice can take a lifetime for some and some people if they find it won’t even use it. You seemed to have not only discovered your voice but have useed it from a young age. Can you share more about your journey?

A lot of it was constantly being faced with adversity that I didn’t create for myself from a young age. When I was four-years-old, my parents and I had already started fighting together so that my needs could be met in school. I spoke in front of the Rhode Island House Finance Committee but I didn’t understand at the time what I was doing. I understood I had to say something about something that was against the law and I knew what I had to say. When I got up on an apple box, something changed in the room. As I grew up that was a thing that I always did.

A reason I was always comfortable speaking out in public but not expressing myself in private–with friends or in school–is because everyone of us experiences and interprets the world differently. Somehow as a collective society, we have decided that someone’s experience that might be different is a disservice, and that qualifies you as having a disability. The disability isn’t created by your body, sure your sense of sight or hearing might not work in the same way, but that is not disabling to you. It’s just a new way to experience the world. What is disabling is that we, as a society and infrastructure, don’t allow our world to be accessible to groups of people who may experience things in those ways. So somehow it has become a system of privilege or hegemony that we can’t escape and that’s what creates disability. Obviously, I didn’t understand that as an eight-year-old but somewhere subconsciously I realized that if you speak up and you tell people who you are and you share your story it’s going to help. I had two really great parents who would stand up and fight with me and teach me how to do that. We didn’t have a lot of money, or come from anything, so we piecemealed a lot together. I knew there were a lot of kids who had to go to a school that was neglectful and abusive and they went home to neglect and abuse. I got to go home to two loving parents and a dog. I knew if I spoke up that hopefully, I could make things better for a kid who didn’t have what I had even though we didn’t have a lot.

To have that bravery at such a young age is incredible! Your Ted Talk, ‘The Power of Solidarity and Silence’ was powerful, I have a feeling this will go viral very soon. What inspired you to give it?

It’s going to be so funny to hear how people react to that in a couple of months. I always liked listening to them and I was ready to do something that wasn’t advocacy. More importantly, college was the first place outside of my family where I felt like I belonged and felt safe. People outside of my family were telling me I mattered and that what I said and did mattered. I was in a classroom for the first time since I was eight and it was terrifying. Socially I was very insecure and it took a lot for me to feel okay. The professors realized I didn’t come from a good place in that sense and were like, you have a lot of potential; they weren’t sure why it wasn’t embraced from a young age. They treated me the way that everyone expects to be treated and for me that was special. I have had professors say to me now, a couple of years after I left, that they didn’t do anything different for me. I just didn’t come from a good background, so them treating me in a ‘normal way’ and being good teachers and good people was something I just didn’t have. They encouraged me to tell my story They wanted me to tell my story in a way that wasn’t legal, political, or going to the UN. It would get the political people to listen and to make change—imagine what it could do for people from other backgrounds.

I think the message of letting everyone know they matter is really powerful.

Yes, and that’s what I want to do as an actor and why I want to do this job. There is a whole population of people who are being told, either explicitly or implicitly because of barriers and society, that they don’t matter, they don’t belong and they shouldn’t be out in the world. Here is a literal billboard of why they do. It’s so powerful and that’s why I want to continue to do this because so many people need someone to stand up for them.

You are coming out with a bang for sure! Speaking of impact, like you mentioned, you also have done a lot of work with the UN and UNICEF. How did you get involved with both of these organizations and what is your mission?

I started with the UN in high school. I didn’t go to college knowing what I wanted to do, but I was smart so I figured I would be an academic who was also interested in foreign service. When I was in high school, I applied for a scholarship and I got it. I ended up giving a speech on the UN floor, which was a crazy Cinderella story.

I realized when I was there that a lot of this was an uphill battle. I wondered if there was a way to do it more impactfully or what exactly to do with it. I didn’t know as much about myself or if I wanted that to be my career, but I did it and I studied very hard. When I started acting, the first thing I said to my team was that I’d like to be involved in something UNICEF and UN related. People listen to actors, people don’t listen to 20-something academics, whether or not that is right it’s not my place to say, but I get to do both of those things. I get to be the academic mind and the public figure people want to listen to and maybe relate to more.

I saw you were recently in New York and you spoke on a panel during Climate Week.

I am a really big advocate for education and for women, girls and people with disabilities to get educated. As I have grown up, I have realized it is quintessentially important and literacy is the thing I am most passionate about in the whole wide world. But you can’t have any of those things if the planet is exploding around you and don’t have access to clean air, water, and food and have political violence. If you have a planet that’s the first step but we can’t fight for education, for the groups who need it, unless we have a planet to live on. So more recently, I have been maturing and streamlining myself to tackle things from that side.

I read you are on pause from getting a Ph.D, do you think that’s something you will pursue in the future?

I wasn’t terribly happy as an academic. I loved what I studied but I wasn’t necessarily happy with it as a career path. I found the career path I want to be on and my studies are wildly relevant to it. We are creating this new language that doesn’t exist around inclusion, accessibility, and blindness as a topic, a topic that doesn't get talked about. As we move forward, the language will evolve and develop and get us away from exclusion and oppression. My Ph.D focuses on the history of language, and media literacy but for the time being, I am on a leave of absence. It’s open for me to return, it’s always there for me, but it’s not my career.

So acting now is your full-time job?

The interest and support I have gotten to do this full time has been really good. From the space of accessibility and inclusion, I look at it as a perspective that I have embraced my culture in a way that I can portray and capture it authentically on screen. I also think it’s an important step to make sure that those stories are told truthfully and authentically from all sides not just an actor portraying them on screen. On the flip side, we have had such a culture of sighted actors being able to portray blind characters, that doesn't leave a lot of space open for embracing anything other than a hegemony of able-bodiedness. I would really like to be the person who breaks that for the first time especially living the life I have had to live and put it on its head. We can attack this from three sides behind the camera, in front of the camera, and society’s expectations of what it mean to be an actor. If sighted people can embrace blind culture then I can embrace theirs because I had to live that way so I could be included in the first place. It’s all very special to me.

Do you think you’d ever like to pursue another side of storytelling behind the camera?

I am pursuing writing for the first time. I would love to dive into film and TV, but I haven’t yet. I am mostly working on novels right now. I have one book that I wrote with my best friend. Like I said, I was at this beautiful place academically and I had these grants, scholarships, and won a Fulbright but I was trying to figure out why I wasn’t happy. During Covid, my best friend and I wrote a novel together.

That’s wonderful, You are following your bliss, that is so important to living a full life.

If you know or the people around you know that when you are a child you are prone to certain things, like for me storytelling or performing, you should at least try to embrace that. I am so glad I was able to but I wished we lived in a world where that could have been nurtured and could have celebrated it when I came out of the womb singing (laughs).

But you can do that for future generations, I believe every generation has the power to be better than the one before. I know it’s cliche, but I really do believe it.

As a kid, I didn’t have anyone to look up who was like me—not a single person—in books, TV, or movies. I get to be that person to someone, maybe in all of those areas. It’s terrifying but it’s amazing. I have to be that person for myself, too. It’s unusual to go into something like this and genuinely be the first because so much of this industry has been done before in some way. There is always someone who came before you and shoulders who you can stand up on, but in my instance, I don’t have anyone. This is the first time the glass ceiling has been broken, I can’t take credit for being the one to break it. The credit has to go to the people who cast me and the producers because they could have hired a very famous 20-something actor. I think we are at such a place where I want the little girl I was, all of those little kids, who are questioning the same things I questioned to be able to turn on the TV, open the pages of a magazine, or flip open YouTube and find someone who is like them.

Wow, there is power in that. Before I let you go, and you might have already alluded to this, but do you have a motto that leads you through each day that you lean into when you need it?

I have a list actually (laughs). I am a linear, organized, and rational person, which is funny coming from a creative space. I have one I was told when I was little, I can’t take credit for it, but it’s, don’t ever forget to be who you are because what’s in your heart will light a star. I have that in my bedroom on the wall. My other big one is, be a good human, simple, that’s how I sign off on my emails. Then, always keep your puns intentional, and, never be without chocolate. I am always surrounded by things like that–my notebooks, my water bottle has messages on it–I rotate out what I need. It helps me when I need to connect with someone and I don’t know how.

I can’t wait to see what else you are going to do.

It’s going to be interesting to see, it’s so funny, everything I do is pushing a boundary in some way. It’s fun but also intimidating and unpredictable. I like that because that’s what I didn’t like about being an academic, it was predictable. I know some people hate where they don’t know what their next job is but it’s really freeing to me to think that I don’t know what my next job is, it could literally be anything, and that’s really cool. To know I can do it and achieve something with my own confidence, that’s a big step.

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This interview was edited slightly for length. A special thank you for this team and Viewpoint PR.

Introducing November Starring Aria Mia Loberti