Burn, Baby, Burn

Born In Puerto Rico, then brought to New York City when he was months old, Janthony is the son of a Vietnam vet and a high school drop out. He spent his first 18 years in Ridgewood, Queens before migrating to Manhattan’s upper west side. As a single parent, Janthony’s mom worked as a seamstress and maintenance worker in Manhattan, while Janthony became a latch key kid and found a voice in theater.
By high school, Janthony was working in fast food and enrolled in youth theater companies, where he honed his ability to write. He cut class often to go to auditions, using his own written monologues as audition material. Directly after high school, Janthony skipped college and started his own theater company. He ran, wrote, and acted with the company for 5 years before they disbanded. Janthony would leave acting behind and focus solely on writing. As a playwright, three of his full-length plays were produced in New York City. Several of his one-act plays were staged mostly in New York, but also in Los Angeles and Bristol, England. Some of the companies and festivals that staged and workshopped Anthony’s work include The Hip Hop Theater Festival, Labyrinth Theater Company, and the Rebel Verses Theater Festival.
To provide for himself, and fund his projects, Janthony kept day jobs which included educational theater artist, counter-terrorism supply salesman, marijuana delivery (way before it was the norm), bartender, retail, busboy, residential real estate assistant property manager, dog walker, and exterminator.
In 2016 he was accepted into Tisch’s School of the Arts (Film and TV Program), and graduated with honors with a degree in writing and directing in 2019. Janthony interned for Martin Scorsese for a year, and also was part of the first group of interns at Desus and Mero on Showtime. His intermediate short film, Scarfaced, was a finalist for NYU’s New Vision and Voices Festival 2018. It won best male actor award for fellow CAT youth theater alumni, Victor Almanzar. Scarfaced was also accepted into the 2019 HBO New York Latino Film Festival, as well as the 2019 Dominican Film Festival in New York City, BLVD IV, The Latinx21 Festival, the Lift-Off Global Network Film Festival, and a Semi-Finalist in the 2019 Los Angeles CineFest.
In November 2020, Evelyn Torres at the ICU was named a finalist in the 2nd Annual Ya Tu Sabes Monologue Slam, produced by Nosotros and sponsored by NBC. The 2nd Annual Ya Tu Sabes Monologue Slam streamed on Facebook Watch on December 9th, 2020.
Janthony currently works as the production assistant to the editorial team for the upcoming Martin Scorsese feature, Killers of the Flower Moon, as he pursues a career as a writer and director for film and television. Anthony is also a published fiction writer.