Juani Feliz is an actress born in the Dominican Republic and raised in the Bronx. She fell in love with acting at the age of 14 after joining her middle school's production of Shakespeare's Othello. With an immediate love for the craft, Juani spent her free time researching how to become a professional actress and begging her parents to drive her around the city for open calls and acting classes Within a year, she landed her first talent manager and began auditioning—booking her first roles in TV and film.

 

Juani's acting took a backseat when she left NYC to attend Harvard University. Wanting to explore the sciences in college, Juani studied Biomedical Engineering at Harvard. Right out of college, Juani worked at the Wyss Institute for Biologically Inspired Engineering in Boston, where she worked on a clinical trial for a melanoma cancer vaccine and helped develop new biomaterials and drug delivery systems. During this time Juani also completed a Master's degree at Harvard. 

 

Despite a promising future in bioengineering, Juani felt a deep pull back to acting and moved back to New York City to restart her acting career. As she reignited her artistic journey, her "survival jobs" consisted of medical research—contributing to clinical trials at Columbia University Medical Center and Mount Sinai Hospital. At Columbia, she worked on clinical trials for strokes, brain hemorrhages, and seizures; at Mount Sinai, she worked on a bench-to-bedside trial exploring personalized cancer therapies.

 

Since returning to acting, Juani has worked on a range of TV and film projects for both the big screen and small screen. On the film side, she can be seen in Alex Garland’s A24 action epic Civil War and starring in Ross Partridge's psychological horror thriller Birthrite. On television, she’ll next appear in The Terror: Devil in Silver, the third installment of Ridley Scott’s AMC anthology series. She can also be seen in FX’s Emmy-nominated Fleishman Is In Trouble, Ava DuVernay’s HBO Max miniseries DMZ, and Tracy Oliver’s Amazon comedy series Harlem.

 

Earlier this year, Juani was tapped to headline CBS' potential spinoff of The Equalizer alongside Titus Welliver. The two portrayed a father-daughter duo introduced in a backdoor pilot episode of the original series. When CBS ultimately decided not to move forward with the spinoff, Juani became available and was soon cast as a series regular in Ryan Murphy’s new ABC drama, 9-1-1: Nashville. There she stars as Roxie Alba, an adrenaline junkie, former trauma surgeon turned firefighter paramedic.

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Juani's on-screen presence has started to garner the attention of Latin America. For two consecutive years, she was nominated alongside Zoe Saldaña for the “Best Actor/Actress Abroad” award at the Dominican Republic’s prestigious award show Premios Soberano. In 2022, she was named one of People en Español’s “50 Más Bellos” (“50 Most Beautiful”), under their "Dejando Huella" ("Leaving a Mark") category. Juani's goal is to play roles and tell stories that break the mold and defy stereotypes of Latina women in America, just as she has been able to do in real life. She hopes to use her artistic platform to inspire strength, confidence, and possibility in women, the BIPOC and LGBTQ+ communities she proudly represents—and anyone fighting adversity in pursuit of their dreams.