In September, filmmaker Carla Forte released Miki Maniaco, a dark, twisted vision of exile, celebrity, and South Florida. The feature film by the Venezuelan-born director is a made-in-Miami nightmare that's hard to watch yet impossible to turn away from. Forte's dark comedy expertly combines dance, theater, and cinema to depict a suffocating, wet, manic world. By the film's end, you'll be relieved it's over but already itching to lose yourself once again in the filmmaker's eagle-eyed vision.

After finding viral success on YouTube, Issa Rae made the leap to television with her hit HBO series Insecure. Over five seasons, the series explored Black womanhood and friendships and the existential dread that has come to define the millennial experience. After the series wrapped in 2021, the question quickly became: What would Rae do next? The answer arrived the following year with the premiere of Rap Sh!t on HBO Max (now Max), a series that follows two women as they attempt to scale the ladder of success in Miami's rap industry. Rae is a native of Los Angeles, and there's reason to be skeptical of any outsider's ability to portray this town accurately. But Rae and her writing team were more than up to the task. Aida Osman and KaMillion bring their characters of Shawna and Mia to life as their story unfolds over eight episodes as they hustle and scheme their way to the top. Crucially, the series was shot on location, including scenes in Liberty City, Little Haiti, and Miami Beach. We were sad to learn that the second season will see Rap Sh!t's storyline move to California — thanks to a generous tax credit, the likes of which our state is unwilling to offer. But Miami should still thank Rae for the most accurate fictional portrayal of Miami thus far. Seduce and scheme forever!

Founded by dancer and choreographer Pioneer Winter, the Pioneer Winter Collective is a wholly inclusive dance company. Its mission: to celebrate queerness, humanity, and vulnerability. Winter welcomes everyone, and believes that every body is a dance body. The company's latest work, Birds of Paradise, marked the collective's return to performing after the COVID-19 shutdown. Since its 2021 debut, the 75-minute performance has constantly evolved, undergoing at least iterations, all of which explore the theme of rebirth.

In 2021, after the passing of Joseph Adler, GableStage tapped Bari Newport to lead the company into the future. Newport, who'd served as artistic director of the Penobscot Theatre Company in Bangor, Maine, for nine years, took over with the specter of the pandemic still looming over everything. Even then, she pulled off a well-received debut season with productions of Authur Miller's The Price, Claudia Rankine's The White Card, and Tanya Saracho's Fade. Newport flexed her theatrical muscles for the 2022-23 season, introducing South Florida audiences to We Will Not Be Silent by David Meyers, Lucas Hnath's A Doll's House Part 2, and El Huracán by Charise Castro Smith. The company recently announced its 2023-24 season — also its 25th anniversary — which will feature August Wilson's How I Learned What I Learned, the Miami premiere of Jon Marans' Old Wicked Songs, and the premiere of Alexis Scheer's Laughs in Spanish. With a lineup like that, a $180 to $360 season pass is more than worth it.

As associate artistic director of Area Stage Company, Giancarlo Rodaz is a risk taker, unafraid to challenge his audiences, actors, and even plays. Take for instance the tale as old as time where Rodaz used his magical touch to transform Disney's Beauty and the Beast into a work that might've impressed Walt himself. Realizing that if he was going to go big, he couldn't go home, Rodaz moved his vision from Area Stage's small South Miami home base to the Adrienne Arsht Center's Carnival Studio Theater Center. Rather than sit in theater seats, Rodaz cast the audience as guests at wooden benches and long tables, from which actors not only sang and traded dialogue, but danced, ran, jumped and leaped all around them. B&B was the third in a series of reinventions wherein Rodaz reinterpreted big-scale musicals with abandon: In 2018, he stripped down Shrek The Musical, ditching the green ogre and donkey personas, among others, and presenting human characters (Shrek was distinguishable by a green clown nose) struggling with modern problems. In 2021, his immersive Annie featured eight adult actors in all roles — no kids. Rodaz's minimalist approach launched these fairy tales to new heights. Next, he'll take on The Little Mermaid — we can only imagine how he'll render "under the sea."

Create Dangerously and its nonlinear storyline may not precisely fit the standard format of what a play should be. At one point, one of the characters even tells the audience in all honesty, "This isn't really a play." But it does make for good theater. It's an adaptation of the book Create Dangerously by Miami national treasure and multi-award-winning Haitian-American novelist Edwidge Danticat. Miamian Lileana Blain-Cruz (the current resident director at Lincoln Center Theater in New York) was recruited by Miami New Drama to write and direct the adaptation. During the 90-minute production, six actors portray multiple roles as Danticat's prose rolls off their tongues. It's reminiscent of generations of storytelling, and it offers the audience perspective, reflection, and the opportunity to live inside someone else's stories.

Gabriell Salgado wins this category three times over. In the past year, he has been seen in almost every local professional theater production that calls for a good-looking Latino. But casting directors don't just want him for his body. The 2019 New World School of the Arts grad made his professional debut at Zoetic Stage in 2021's Frankenstein, proving himself a talent to be reckoned with as a hideous creature, skinny, contorted, and covered in makeup that rendered his body and face in scars and stitches. This season, he turned in a gold medal-worthy performance as professional swimmer Ray in Ronnie Larsen's production of Red Speedo the Foundry in Wilton Manors and made his GableStage debut playing comical dual roles in El Huracán. But wait — there's more! As Juan Julian in Miami New Drama's production of Nilo Cruz's Anna in the Tropics, he commanded the stage alongside veteran actors in a play that won the 2003 Pulitzer Prize for Drama. Let's just hope Salgado doesn't flee the subtropical nest too soon — South Florida theater needs him.

Jeni Hacker's mantra must be: "Bring it on." One of her most memorable roles was in Zoetic Stage's 2019 production of Sweeney Todd, in which she put her own zany spin on the serial killer's accomplice and Cockney cook, Mrs. Lovett. There've been other comedy roles, and serious ones, too. This season, as the lead in Zoetic Stage's Next to Normal, Hacker showed the entire spectrum of her skills, from her knack for comic timing to a vocal range that wrapped around the rock musical's score (during her post-college days in Miami, she led an R&B band). Hacker mesmerized the audience with her layered portrayal of Diana, a woman with bipolar disorder, trying to keep her family intact and her own head above water. Ronnie Larsen, who cast her in his play Grindr Mom in 2019, commented that since working with the actress he has become "the president of the Jeni Hacker fan club" — of which, in South Florida theater circles, there's no shortage of members.

Miami comedian and commentator George Harris grinds out material that slays week in and week out. Harboring a seemingly endless reserve of energy for the stage, the Venezuelan transplant has struck a chord with observational bits about immigrants' experience assimilating into American culture. Since getting his start playing comedy shows in Miami to a handful of attendees, Harris has climbed up the comedy rungs to the point where he's a household name in Spanish-language comedy, with millions of followers on social media. He headlines a long-running weekly show aptly titled "El Show de George Harris" on Thursdays at La Scala de Miami on Brickell Bay Drive. His Hijo Unico tour dates stretch around the globe from Mexico City to Madrid.

Juicy Love Dion's not just the ol' cartwheel diva. The former FIU cheerleader calls herself "Miami's Afro-Cuban dancing doll" and has a a mug that leaves no crumbs. Her high-energy lip-sync routines regularly fill venues wall-to-wall. Not only can she flip midair and land into a split with the ease of an Olympic gymnast, but she does it all while serving impeccable looks with nary an eyelash out of place. At 22 years old, Juicy's roots in the Haus of Love have taken her performances from South Florida hubs, like R House and Queer Parties, across the world to the luxurious JackieO' Town Bar in Mykonos, Greece.