Actress
Play-writer
Dancing
Spoken Word Poet

Charmaine Santiago Galdón has been a resident of Boston since her birth in 1988. Charmaine’s parents are from Puerto Rico and she has spent a lot of time with her family there. She attended Jose Julian Acosta, a high school specializing in theatre, in Old San Juan Puerto Rico. During her time there she was trained by professors and teachers who have traveled the world and were trained in different forms of theatre, acting, playwriting, directing, and costume design. During her summers, Charmaine started working as a Teaching Artist at age 14. She taught theatre and acting to middle and high school students. Charmaine went on to receive her Bachelor of Arts in Theatre from the University of Massachusetts Amherst. During her time at UMass, she would be cast and performed through the five colleges in Western Massachusetts. Charmaine later became a cast member and subsequently the co-director of Body Politics, a production by women of color performing dance, poetry, storytelling, and singing. 

In 2011 after college she was awarded several internships at the world-renowned  off-Broadway  Puerto Rican theater company in New York called, Pregones Theater. Charmaine founded an Afro Puerto Rican Folkloric Bomba group and named it Bomba Sankofa due to her journey of understanding her identity when she moved to Puerto Rico. The group was unique by mixing storytelling through spoken word and hip-hop elements. 

Her future goal is to create a youth, theatre company that ties in with the Afro-Latin diaspora and many other beautiful and unique cultures from different walks of life around the world to help the youth understand and research their cultural identity with a unique twist. She always taps in and looks back at is the definition of Sankofa "We must go back to our roots in order to move forward. We should reach back and gather the best of what our past has to teach us so that we can achieve our full potential as we move forward. Whatever we have lost, forgotten, forgone, or been stripped of, can be reclaimed, revived, preserved, and perpetuated." - (Akan people) Sankofa. She lives by those words in the day, as she continues to stay grounded about and culturally diverse as a woman of color. 

Charmaine spends her time developing and collaborating with other Boston artists and upcoming directors through hip-hop performances, spoken word, and also as an actress and artistic consultant. Her expertise as a performer, dancer, director, and educator has led her to not only be an artist, but also a healer, a mentor, and a Youth artist advocate.  

Email
cgaldon1855@gmail.com