Music with a message
Sophia Angelica is a singer with a mission
Singer-songwriter and human rights activist Sophia Angelica wants to inspire the world — one Latin pop song at a time.
The Argentinian-American recording artist has had a taste for the entertainment industry for as long as she can remember. She was raised in a show biz family — her mother Susan Rybin is a stage actress who owns a Manhattan acting school and talent management firm for Latino kids, while her father is a classical guitarist — so a creative career always “felt very natural” to her.
“I basically grew up in the business,” Angelica told the Daily News. “I started out acting, then I naturally fell into singing and into music.”
The New York-born artist began singing when she was 7 years old, and by the age of 12 she was performing a notoriously difficult Whitney Houston song at a women’s empowerment conference at the United Nations. A year later she was making her television debut singing on Fox’s “Good Day New York” and voicing a few different characters on Nickelodeon’s “Dora the Explorer.”
“And from there, it was a snowball effect,” Angelica said, noting that invitations to perform in human rights conferences kept popping up.
As her music career took off — taking her to perform in venues around the country and the world — the “Here I Am” singer also fully embraced her role as a young activist and a fierce defender of human rights.
For over a decade now, she has used her voice to fight against bullying and racism — and also to help save the life of a loved one. The song “My Brother, Big Brother,” which she wrote and released in 2019, was instrumental in connecting her 32-year-old sibling Christopher Rybin, who was in need of a kidney transplant, to a life-saving donor.
The Lindon, N.J., resident has traveled in the U.S. and abroad to take part in human rights conferences, where she speaks out against bullying and discrimination while using her original, bilingual songs as a way to share messages of hope.
Between speaking engagements and performances, Angelica felt that her songwriting had a clear theme. “I noticed that a lot of my music that I had been writing for a very long time was related to bullying in some way, or to discrimination,” she told The News.
“Especially since I’m Latina, and I’m bilingual,” she said, thinking about some of the students in her mother’s acting classes, “who have suffered from bullying, because of their race and because they’re Hispanic.”
At 23, Angelica has now decided to focus 100% on her music. Her two latest singles, the empowerment ballad “Here I Am” and the upbeat love song “Que Sería de Mi” (“What would become of me”) are part of her journey to use her personal experiences, colored with Latin-inspired sounds and an upbeat TikTok-ready vibe, to spread positivity and inspire others.
While her first album is still in the works, fans can expect a new single “coming soon,” said the singer, who will perform at Heaven Can Wait in the East Village on April 25 and at Rockwood Music Hall on the Lower East Side on June 7.
In the meantime, Angelica says she wants to keep doing what she likes best: “Creating new music, creating new art, and sharing it with the world’ ” — while using her art “to support social causes and to spread a positive message.”