Karina Noelle Castillo is a multifaceted individual, hailing from Los Angeles, California, with a rich background in the arts. As an alumna of the prestigious Los Angeles County High School for the Arts and the California Institute of the Arts, she majored in Theatre and began her career as an assistant editor at boutique production company Lodger Films, working on the web series Jerk All Stars, a Jerking dance competition hosted on MySpace and sponsored by Sprite.
Her impressive portfolio has since grown to include editing projects for various channels such as ABC, FYI, FOX, MeTV, and Amazon. In 2014, Karina had the honor of serving as the honorary Quinceanera for Hollywood Forever Cemetery's 15-year anniversary celebration of its famous Dia De Los Muertos event, which drew a crowd of over 40,000 people, making it the largest Day of the Dead celebration in Los Angeles.
Karina's entrepreneurial spirit led her to co-found and become the CEO of Courtyard Entertainment, LLC, a production company specializing in music videos, short films, and acting services. In 2019, she partnered with co-founder Stevie Rae Dominguez to launch The Heartbreak Artists, a Los Angeles-based arts collective aimed at supporting local artists in their pursuit of beauty in chaos. This subsidiary of Courtyard Entertainment seeks to highlight life's bitter-sweetness through various art forms, including poetry, cartooning, painting, filmmaking, and photography.
The Heartbreak Artists' annual art gallery and festival, Heart Beats, brings together Los Angeles artists to create original work about their personal journeys of love and loss. Karina is also the creator of Humana/Xicana, a clothing line that connects her to her indigenous roots by incorporating the iconography of Pre-Columbian civilizations into modern designs, featuring imagery of Aztec Gods, traditional Mexican foods, and inspiration from various codices throughout history.
Karina's accomplishments have earned her recognition, including the 2022 Mexican-American Cultural Education Foundation (MACEF) Filmmaker Production Grant, a Second Rounder in the ScreenCraft Film Fund Grant, and a spot among the seven students chosen to participate in the MACEF Masters Workshop in 2023.
