Raoul Trujillo

Biography

Raoul Trujillo was born in northern New Mexico. He is a mixed blood descendant of Apache,Comanche, Pueblo, Tlascalan, French-Canadian, Sephardic Jew and Andalusian Moor. After high school, he spent three years serving in the military in Germany. After his discharge, he worked as an alpine ski instructor in Taos, New Mexico. Ski Flash Magazine out of France wrote about him and his unique style of teaching skiing. He left the world of professional skiing after traveling extensively through Mexico, Central and South America on his way to teach in San Carlos de Bariloche in Argentina. It was a wake up call to exploring native America and beginning his journey in creating art based on his cultural roots.. He started work in the theatre as a scenic painter and landed his first job in 1977 as an actor/dancer in a production of "EQUUS", in Santa Fe, N.M. It was his first paid professional work as well as his debut in the theatre with no training at all albeit high school drama. He now had the bug to study formally. He began dancing in Los Angeles in 1978 at USC and saw his first modern dance and ballet productions; Pilobolus, Martha Graham and Rudolph Nureyev. He was hooked. The next two years, he trained extensively with the Toronto Dance Theatre and Nikolais/Louis Dance Lab in New York City on scholarships. He was asked to join Nikolais Dance Theatre under the direction of the master Alwin Nikolais, who became his mentor and he began touring the world performing in the grandest of opera houses and old Roman theatres in northern Africa to bamboo fields in China. He also learned scenic, costume and lighting design during this time from 1980 to 1987. After leaving the company, he began his solo work as dancer and choreographer and commenced his journey into shamanic…