Yaya DaCosta in Tron Movie (Dec 2010)
March 8, 2011
To learn more about Cycle 3‘s runner-up, Yaya DaCosta, visit her bio page here.
CLICK HERE TO WATCH YAYA DACOSTA IN TRON – TRAILER
(She is the “siren” on the left.)
Source: VBonmovies.com
In July of 2006, the Village Voice posted an online article about college students who also model. Cycle 3’s Yaya DaCosta Johnson discussed her experience modeling in conjunction with her studies. Here’s the text from the article (written by Christine Lagorio):
The Mind-Body Problem
Don’t hate me because I’m beautiful—and smart: College students who modelBarely a semester into Yale, Robin Hazelwood, a chisel-jawed 5′ 9 1/2″ fashion model, got sick of the two responses she’d hear when a stylist or photographer discovered her Ivy League status. “You must be a genius!” was the most common, Hazelwood says. “The second was, ‘Well, there must be a lot of rich guys on campus.’”
“I think highly of myself, but I don’t think I’m exactly genius material,” says Hazelwood, now the author of Model Student: A Tale of Co-eds and Cover Girls(Crown), a chick-lit “cautionary tale” about the modeling industry. “But they would say it in all sincerity.”
Fat English-lit anthologies and fluorescent highlighters are foreign to the fashion world, but Hazelwood often had them in tow during her Yale years, from 1988 to 1992. She recalls cramming for a final during a shoot in the Caribbean—precisely where Emily Woods in Hazelwood’s roman à clef is found reading Milton on the beach by her feisty, gum-snapping hairdresser. (The coiffeuse’s reaction after flipping through Paradise Lost: “Good lord, you’re a genius!”)
As for the supposed rich guys, Hazelwood never needed them— she estimates she earned between $80,000 and $90,000 in the summer before her freshman year alone. Besides, Hazelwood explains over a Stoli soda in her Upper West Side neighborhood, “the broad strokes” of Emily’s character in Model Studentmirror her own experiences, and throughout the book, Emily’s love affair is with runways and glossy magazine pages, not a fellow student.
In her lucrative liaison —long weekends in exotic locales, designer gifts, all the lettuce, champagne, and coke she could consume—young Emily, who attends Columbia, feels like an Ivy League philanderer, Barbie’s evil twin in a sea of Dukakis T-shirts and frayed jeans. She vows to keep her modeling gigs secret from her studious roommates and friends, tucking her designer frocks into storage bags and ceasing-and-desisting all shoulder pad and eyeliner use. (This is a sacrifice: It’s New York in the late ’80s.)
The secret holds for a couple hours, until half the Columbia football team arrives on Emily’s dorm doorstep, checking out her lanky frame and asking to see her fashion portfolio.
Hazelwood says she psyched up for freshman year at Yale by telling herself, “OK, Robin, this is a very intellectual bastion. People are going to be in the dining hall talking about Nietzsche and Proust—very serious things. No one can know you’re a model.” Hazelwood admits she was wrong about Proust buzz, but was right that mentioning modeling brought to the surface assumptions that her latest intellectual pursuit was more nail polish than Naipaul. In her inability to hermetically seal her work life from her world on campus, Hazelwood’s Emily confronts stereotyping on both fronts.
Our culture is fascinated by the mind-body problem presented by people—especially women–who are both physically and intellectually stunning. Pop culture lets beauty and smarts duke it out in game shows, like the WB’s recent Beauty and the Geek 2. The Miss America pageant, which began as a competition of looks, later adopted talent and interview segments; now it’s billed as a scholarship contest. The assumed beauty-brains paradox provided a plotline for America’s Next Top Model, during which cycle three runner-up Yaya Da Costa, a recent Brown graduate, had a heart-to-heart with host Tyra Banks about her decidedly non-intellectual career move. (Tyra: “Do you think you are going to choose one or the other?” Yaya: “I think of it like this: I’m 21 years old.”)
Most models, like most ballet dancers, don’t graduate college. To really succeed takes a full-steam approach at a wrinkle-free age. And as Emily discovers, taking off days to cram for finals or attend college formals doesn’t make casting-minded agents happy. Top Model‘s Da Costa says she feels lucky to have waited to graduate before making a career out of modeling. But to her, modeling is still a “surreal world” in which it is difficult to practice any of the four foreign languages she speaks while getting her hair done.
“In modeling you put on a mask and accept that they don’t want to hear you, that they don’t really care what you think,” Da Costa tells the Voice. “You learn to just play the game, and it’s very light and fluffy and convenient.”
Stanford student and part-time model Logan McClure, 20, encountered academia’s backlash against beauty early and often. During her senior year in an all-girls Palo Alto high school shortly after she began modeling, her class considered hosting an end-of-the-year fashion show. The idea was quickly squashed by fellow students protesting the objectification of women. McClure kept quiet, thankful that no one seemed to have seen her latest catalog appearances.
Once in college, McClure didn’t attempt to keep modeling secret—mostly due to the implausibility of doing so: Within weeks of starting classes at Stanford, a rumor spread that she’d modeled for Abercrombie & Fitch (she hadn’t). Denial was useless, because she’d appeared in plenty of other catalogs and was going to castings three days per week. Her friends were fascinated, and only one professor has found out.
“There is a shallowness in the industry, and there are the eating disorders,” McClure says. “When I was in Greece I lived with a girl who only ate fruit— ever. But another girl there from Norway is probably the most beautiful person I’ve ever met and she’s the only girl in her engineering class.”
Hazelwood’s novel deals in the industry’s underbelly of sex, drugs, and collagen, but she hopes Model Student doesn’t come across as a bitter tell-all. At least she ‘s not bitter—she says her 13 years of catwalks and covers were worthwhile, because she didn’t miss too many lectures and got a lock on writing about an industry that is “darker and funnier” than even Zoolander portrayed. As for long-term side effects, Hazelwood says, “I’m reluctant to say it made me dumber, but my brain definitely thought more superficially. You kiss each other like 50 times when you say hello, but you don’t really know anything about them, you know?”
To learn more about Cycle 3 runner up, Yaya DaCosta, visit her bio page here.
Source: VillageVoice.com
Photo: CW / Hyungwan Roo
Yaya DaCosta Johnson at Style Rocks Fashion Show (2005)
April 14, 2010
Yaya DaCosta Johnson Portfolio for Ford Models Chicago
April 14, 2010
Yaya DaCosta Johnson Interview with Zap2it.com (Apr 06)
April 14, 2010
In April of 2006, Zap2it.com posted an interview with Cycle 3’s Yaya DaCosta Johnson with regards to her movie role alongside Antonio Banderas in dance flick Take the Lead. Here’s the text from the article (written by Hanh Nguyen):
On “America’s Next Top Model,” Yaya DaCosta was the brainy, Afro-centric runner-up on the show’s third season. Now she’s starring opposite Antonio Banderas in her feature debut “Take the Lead,” and reveals that acting was in the plans all along; modeling was a detour.
“When I was 11, I had taken classes and did some educational films. As far as my family was concerned, I’ve always been acting,” says the Brown University grad. “So I did that show kind of like taking a break from 30-page papers in school on midterm week. I was like, ‘Oh, that would be cute,’ but I didn’t really know what I was getting into. After that was over, it was over.”
She’s grateful for her experience, but was glad to learn from the “Take the Lead” filmmakers that she landed her role solely on her own merit, not the show. In the movie, she plays troubled high school student LaRhette, who raises her siblings while her mom works late and whose brother was killed by a fellow student. The bright spot in her life is afterschool detention, where ballroom dance instructor Pierre Dulaine introduces the students to the finer points of teamwork and terpsichore.
Although DaCosta’s upbringing isn’t like her character’s, she had no problem identifying with LaRhette’s circumstances.
“My parents are educators, I had both parents at home … so it was more secondhand information,” she says. “I’m from New York City, from Harlem, and my ‘hood isn’t one of the nicest in the city. My friends when I was younger had more in common with LaRhette than I did on that level, but it was right there. All I had to do was go to my block.”
She had a bigger challenge with the ballroom dancing scenes, specifically following her partner’s lead.
“All the dance styles that I’d done before were very individualistic. I make all the decisions about what I’m going to do next with my body,” she explains. “This was completely different because it’s a conversation between you and your partner. You have to trust them and relinquish, as a woman, all of your decision making.”
DaCosta, who studied international relations in college, can speak four languages and is currently teaching herself Swahili. She’d like to model her career after “V for Vendetta” star Natalie Portman, another multilingual actress with political interests.
“I have a bunch of dream roles, but at some point I’d love to have an accent or speak another language in a film,” she says. “Or maybe action movies. Aside from dance, I play capoiera, which is a Brazilian martial art … And then I’d love to write some scripts. Look out for some really political stuff from me.”
Right now, though, she’s just enjoying the personalized, ghetto-fabulous earrings LaRhette wore in the film.
“I got to keep the backup ones. So I have my souvenir,” she says. “They’re cute. I wore them once … out in New York and people were like, ‘That’s not your name.’ I was like, ‘Wait and see.’”
“Take the Lead” opens in theaters nationwide on Friday, April 7.
To learn more about Cycle 3 runner up, Yaya DaCosta, visit her bio page here.
(VIA Zap2it)
Yaya DaCosta Johnson for Dr. Scholls (TV Commercial)
April 13, 2010
Yaya DaCosta Johnson Interview with BlackVoices.com (Oct 08)
April 13, 2010
In October of 2008, BlackVoices.com posted an interview with Cycle 3’s Yaya DaCosta Johnson with regards to how her life has changed since America’s Next Top Model. Here’s the text from the article (written by Bridget Bland):
It’s been four years since Yaya DaCosta gained a reputation as being a high-maintenance and overly confident aspiring model on the third cycle of Tyra Banks’ hit reality show ‘America’s Next Top Model.’ And although she made it all the way to the finals — losing the coveted title to Eva Pigford, the Harlem-bred beauty still has good reason to hold her head up high and smile.
While many of the ‘Top Model’ winners have yet to find fame in modeling, acting or otherwise, the 26-year-old thespian has starred in a movie opposite Antonio Banderas (‘Take the Lead’), appeared in commercials for very popular brands (Garnier Fructis and Dr. Scholl’s) and just wrapped a critically-acclaimed run just a stone’s throw from Broadway in ‘The First Breeze of Summer.’
The ‘New York Times — considered the authority on professional theater — has praised DaCosta’s theatrical debut opposite the legendary tour-de-force, Leslie Uggams, with flattering remarks like “sharp” and in “exquisite form” in the Signature Theatre Company’s revival of Leslie Lee’s beloved Negro Ensemble Company work.
Not bad for the beauty who seems to be carving out a niche of becoming one of the most successful contestants in the show’s lengthy history.
“The first time that the world sees you it holds a lot more weight for the public than it does in your own life, and for me [Top Model] is one of many experiences,” DaCosta told BlackVoices.com. “I’m grateful for the show because I learned a bunch of things but it didn’t have much to do [with] what I’m doing right now.”
To learn more about Cycle 3 runner up, Yaya DaCosta, visit her bio page here.
(VIA BlackVoicesNewswire.com)
Below you’ll find the theatre review of The First Breeze of Summer by the New York Times (By Ben Brantley), which includes a review of Cycle 3’s Yaya DaCosta Johnson. Here’s the text from the article:
Her teenage grandson, who has all the shortsightedness of youth, finds it hard to grasp that the gentle, Bible-quoting Lucretia Edwards was a seriously sensuous woman back in the day. But anyone who sees Leslie Uggams’s performance in the Signature Theater Company’s smooth revival of “The First Breeze of Summer,” Leslie Lee’s less-than-smooth drama from 1975, should have no difficulty connecting Lucretia’s disreputable past with her decorous present.
This is not just because this show, the opening entry in a season devoted to the work of the estimable Negro Ensemble Company, offers an onstage version of Lucretia’s younger self in the exquisite form of Yaya DaCosta, in a lovely New York debut. As played by Ms. Uggams, a mind-boggling 41 years after she became a Broadway star in “Hallelujah, Baby!,” Lucretia exudes a sweet grandmotherly serenity, for sure.
But you’re also aware of ripples of distraction within the calm, the kind that besiege old people toward the ends of their lives, when early memories speak loud and clear. And if you squint, you can see the beguiling and easily beguiled girl of long ago beneath the arthritic movements and matronly clothes.
Ms. Uggams’s subtle, contradiction-embracing portrayal provides a welcome ballast for a show that never fully weaves its disparate strands into whole cloth. Watching Ruben Santiago-Hudson’s appealingly acted production, which opened last night at the Peter Norton Space, you can understand why “First Breeze” won an Obie Award for its Off Broadway incarnation and a Tony nomination for best play for its subsequent, brief Broadway run. Its soft-spoken virtues remain clear. But three decades on, its flaws emerge in starker relief.
In an era when African-American plays tended to fiery and polemical confrontation, “First Breeze” was a return to the quieter domestic naturalism associated with “A Raisin in the Sun,” Lorraine Hansberry’s breakthrough Broadway drama of 1959. Part of what many critics found refreshing about “First Breeze” was that it didn’t scream its themes or spell out an agenda.
Tracing just a few days in the home of a small-town Pennsylvania family headed by Milton Edwards (the excellent Keith Randolph Smith), who runs his own plastering business and is Lucretia’s son, Mr. Lee shows big issues refracted through small, quotidian events. Ethnic oppression, economic struggle, the consolations of evangelical religion, sexual conflict, fine shades of racism within a single family: all of these turbulent elements are manifested obliquely in dinner-table conversations, casual business meetings, an after-church hymn-singing session, a surprise birthday party and a Scrabble game.
In counterpoint to this thick slice of life from the 1970s are Lucretia’s living memories, which take form in the guest room where she is staying, of her relationships with her three children’s different fathers: a railroad porter with dreams of self-improvement (Gilbert Owuor), the maverick son of a rich home where she works as a maid (Quincy Dunn-Baker) and a shy, strapping miner who hopes to become a minister (John Earl Jelks).
Without joining the dots in big, bold lines, Mr. Lee makes it clear how the past is the parent of the present, how the historic implications of Lucretia’s love affairs continue to resound in her children’s and grandchildren’s lives. If the flashbacks have a shimmer of the sudsiness associated with Barbara Taylor Bradford novels and Lifetime movies, Ms. DaCosta and the actors playing her lovers are admirably credible.
It’s in the present that “First Breeze” gets into trouble, despite Mr. Santiago-Hudson’s fluid and often astute direction. Mr. Lee is clearly aiming for the accelerating tension of a denial-plagued family in close quarters found in classics like “Long Day’s Journey Into Night” and “The Glass Menagerie.” But in trying to provide chances for everyone in the Edwards clan to emerge as an individual, he winds up shortchanging all of them.
In addition to Lucretia’s troubled relationship with the past, “First Breeze” takes on the emerging Oedipal frictions between Milton and his older son, Nate (Brandon Dirden); the struggles of Milton’s younger son, the bookish and sensitive Lou (Jason Dirden, Brandon’s real-life brother), with his nascent sexuality; and the sibling resentments of Milton’s half-sister, Edna (Brenda Pressley). And that’s just for starters. It’s kind of a relief that Milton’s wife, Hattie (Marva Hicks), doesn’t seem to carry a lot of baggage of her own, although when she’s asked to play a central role in the highly emotional final scene you’re not prepared for it.
You’re not really prepared for any of the melodramatic family fireworks that erupt at the end, though Ms. Uggams does splendidly by them. The scene ties together a lot of separate threads that have been so slender as to be almost invisible. And you may find yourself thinking: “Wait a minute. This was all supposed to be about his relationship with her?”
The real problem with “First Breeze” is one of ambition: it takes on so much, it becomes cross-eyed in trying to fix its focus. (It feels all too appropriate that Michael Carnahan’s impeccably detailed multiroom set seems to sprawl right off the stage.) Fortunately, the double portrait of Lucretia provided by Ms. Uggams and Ms. DaCosta remains sharp. It deserves a less cumbersome frame.
THE FIRST BREEZE OF SUMMER
By Leslie Lee; directed by Ruben Santiago-Hudson; original music and music direction, Bill Sims Jr.; sets, Michael Carnahan; costumes, Karen Perry; lighting, Marcus Doshi; sound, David Margolin Lawson; fight director, Thomas Schall; production stage manager, Winnie Y. Lok; associate artistic director, Beth Whitaker; general manager, Adam Bernstein; production manager, Paul Ziemer. Presented by the Signature Theater Company, James Houghton, artistic director; Erika Mallin, executive director. At the Peter Norton Space, 555 West 42nd Street, Clinton; (212) 244-7529. Through Sept. 28. Running time: 2 hours 40 minutes.
WITH: Harvy Blanks (Reverend Mosely), Yaya DaCosta (Lucretia), Sandra Daley (Gloria Townes), Crystal Anne Dickinson (Hope), Brandon Dirden (Nate Edwards), Jason Dirden (Lou Edwards), Quincy Dunn-Baker (Briton Woodward), Marva Hicks (Hattie), John Earl Jelks (Harper Edwards), Tuck Milligan (Joe Drake), Gilbert Owuor (Sam Green), Brenda Pressley (Aunt Edna), Keith Randolph Smith (Milton Edwards) and Leslie Uggams (Gremmar Edwards).
To learn more about Cycle 3 runner up, Yaya DaCosta, visit her bio page here.
(VIA NYT)
Yaya DaCosta Johnson Cast in TV’s Ugly Betty (Aug 09)
April 13, 2010
Entertainment Weekly posted an article announcing that Cycle 3’s Yaya DaCosta Johnson has landed an acting role in TV’s Ugly Betty. Here’s the text from the article:
Somewhere Tyra Banks is smiling.
Polarizing America’s Next Top Model alum Yaya Dacosta—she was cycle 3’s runner-up—has been tapped to take over the recurring role of Wilhelmina’s defiant daughter Nico on Ugly Betty, sources confirm to me exclusively.
The character—originated by Jowharah Jones—resurfaces in the Oct. 9 season premiere and promptly gets caught up in one of the show’s new mysteries.
Dacosta’s previous acting credits include All My Children and that forgettable dance movie with Antonio Banderas.
On a scale of 1-10 (1 being “ugh, she was an arrogant snot on Top Model!” and 10 being “woo-hoo, I knew she was destined for greatness!”), what do you give this recast?
To learn more about Cycle 3 runner up, Yaya DaCosta, visit her bio page here.
(VIA EW.com)
