Dante Luna

Dante Luna is an independent filmmaker and photographer from Roslindale, Massachusetts. He started taking photos as a kid — to the point of breaking around five of his grandmother's cameras trying to film or photograph whatever was around him. In eighth grade, a photography class at his school gave him his first real assignment: tell a story in five photos. His project was a series about his dog Romeo doing his business — it got him in trouble with the teacher, but it became the most talked-about piece in the class.

His first video, though, didn't involve a camera at all. Before he ever uploaded anything online, he put together a slideshow dramatization of the Bret Hart vs. Shawn Michaels "Iron Man" match from WrestleMania 12 — using wrestling figures, a toy ring, a camera, a computer, and a program that let him add music to a slideshow. He rewrote the ending: in his version, Bret Hart wins. He didn't buy his first real camera until he was 24 — the gap between that first idea and the tool to execute it properly was, in his own words, years.

He uploaded his first video to YouTube at 19 — a music video he made because he believed in a friend's music. That one upload was enough for people to start asking him, "how much do you charge for a video?" — and that's how his freelance career began. He graduated from Hyde Park High School at 17 and later from St. Thomas University in Miami with a bachelor's degree in Philosophy and Global Studies at 20, initially thinking he'd study Law or Business. His YouTube channel's steady success changed his direction instead: he turned that platform into a space to entertain while also visually translating what he was learning about careers, business, and current events.

His first comic convention was Boston Comic Con in 2009. A friend who was into comics wanted to go; Dante, who at the time worked on a TV series for Boston Neighborhood Network, reached out directly to the event's promoter and got press passes for both of them. He dedicated that first documentary project to his uncle David, who had died shortly before and who had introduced him to comics — he felt it would have been unfair to go to that event without him. From that first convention on, Dante describes feeling an urgency to help preserve that culture — the fans and creators gathered in one space.

That first comic con became a sustained pattern for nearly a decade: convention after convention, Dante started closing every interview with the same question — what influence has art had on the life of the person in front of him. That recurring thread, built up project by project, became "ART INFLUENCE," a documentary published in 2018 bringing together some of the most significant interviews of his career: Stan Lee, co-creator of the Marvel universe; the co-creator of the Teenage Mutant Ninja Turtles; the creator of Deadpool; a co-creator of The Walking Dead; plus Robert Englund, Biz Markie, Billy West, Sting, and Mick Foley, among others.

That access didn't arrive all at once — it was built relationship by relationship. In 2013 he met Steve Perry, promoter of Rhode Island Comic Con, the same day he interviewed Jason David Frank; that encounter led to an annual collaboration that still continues every November. Through his relationship with Joseph Bruen and FanFest, Dante got to interview the complete original cast of Mighty Morphin Power Rangers: Jason David Frank (Green/White Ranger), Austin St. John (Red Ranger), Amy Jo Johnson (Pink Ranger), David Yost (Blue Ranger), Walter E. Jones (Black Ranger), Karan Ashley (Yellow Ranger), David Fielding (Zordon), Richard Horvitz (Alpha-5), Paul Schrier and Jason Narvy ("Bulk & Skull"), Barbara Goodson (Rita Repulsa), Kerrigan Mahan (Goldar), Steve Cardenas (the second Red Ranger), and Paul Freeman (Ivan Ooze, from the 1995 film). He also interviewed Lou Ferrigno ("The Incredible Hulk"), Tim Curry, Richard Hatch (Battlestar Galactica), and David Mickey Evans, writer and director of The Sandlot — that last conversation, about PF Flyers sneakers, would become the starting point for a much bigger project almost a decade later.

Dante has been explicit about which of these interviews matter most to him and why. The one with the full Power Rangers cast holds a special place: as a kid, on the playground, he was never picked to play a Ranger — he always ended up playing a "putty," the show's generic foot soldiers. Growing up and ending up working directly with that cast closed a circle he himself describes as something he never expected to live.

The interview with Lou Ferrigno, done in 2015 at Rhode Island Comic Con, carries an extra layer. Dante has a Hulk tattoo in memory of his uncle David — the same uncle he dedicated his first documentary project to. His uncle was sketching a Hulk tattoo design the week he died, and never finished it. Interviewing one of the most recognizable faces behind that character meant, in Dante's own words, closing something that had been left unfinished. That interview is part of a documentary series on comic convention culture he developed with Galactic Productions.

Alongside his convention work, Dante built a body of documentary work focused on community and history. He directed, produced, and edited the Pedro Martinez Foundation's gala in 2019 — alongside Alberto Montalvo, Jonathan Marrero, and Joseph Rivers on filming — and documented the gala again in 2021. That same year he directed "Mission, Movement, Momentum" for the NAACP's Boston Branch. He has also documented preservation efforts at Camp St. Augustine, in Foxboro, Massachusetts, and worked with 1 More Rep Athletics documenting its Hybrid League. His short film "Harriet Tubman Home in Auburn, New York" (2019) is, at 826,000 views, the most-watched individual video on his main channel.

That same documentary curiosity — the one that led him to ask about art's influence at every convention — is what connects his 2017 conversation with David Mickey Evans about PF Flyers to a much bigger later project: "THE SANDLOT FOREVER," a documentary reuniting The Sandlot's cast for its 25th anniversary. His series "BELL TIME CLUB," born from a documentary about an independent wrestling school, follows the same pattern — it takes a personal passion (wrestling, present since his first video with action figures) and turns it into sustained documentation of a real community.

Dante Luna's career has a clear, if not necessarily planned, progression: it started with personal experiments with no real camera — wrestling figures and slideshows — moved to paid music videos at 19, and from there to convention interviews that, over time, became pop-culture documentaries with genuinely exceptional access. In parallel, that same documentary instinct turned toward his own community: foundations, historical organizations, preservation. He sums it up himself as a life spent "packaging ideas, careers, events, and art forms into tangible expressions."

Today he runs two YouTube channels — @danteluna and @eldantico, his original account — totaling more than 700 videos between them. By his own account in 2016, he had already completed more than 500 projects. That same instinct for telling stories with whatever's on hand — whether it's a friend who needs a music video or an entire comic convention — is what, within Brujo Live's catalog, led him to direct "Luz Al Final" (2013) and, later, to share directing duties on "Me Lo Advertía" and "Dime Como Sigo" alongside Joseph Rivers.