Bio
Caitlyn Joi is a multihyphenate actress, musician, and storyteller from Sumter, South Carolina, shaped by the very land her family once worked as enslaved people. Growing up in that history taught her to listen closely to her lineage, to the world around her, and to her own voice, and those echoes guide everything she creates.
As an actor, Caitlyn is rooted in telling stories that honor the Black experience and make her ancestors proud. She discovered the power of performance at Sumter Little Theatre in Joe Turner’s Come and Gone, a moment that connected her to the past in a way she had never felt before. Acting became a calling and a way to inspire change, to lift up the stories of those who must never be forgotten, and to make audiences feel seen. She trained at the South Carolina Governor’s School for the Arts and Humanities and later at Pace University’s BFA Acting program. In the future, she hopes to continue her education by pursuing a Master of Arts.
As a musician, Caitlyn creates alt R&B for the dreamers, the yearners, and the ones who feel deeply. Her sound carries themes of dreaming, revolution, love, community, transcendence, and Black girlhood, all wrapped in vivid visual storytelling. She began writing poems and songs as a kid and was known as the girl freestyling on the back of the bus, but it was during COVID, in isolation, that she truly found her voice. Recording her first songs became a lifeline, and since releasing her first two singles, she has returned to the drawing board with new intention, learning production, sharpening her craft, and becoming more specific about what she wants to say as an artist.
Being a Southern Black woman shapes her creativity with groundedness, raw honesty, softness, and ancestral guidance. Her work, whether on stage, on screen, or in music, is always pro Black, always rooted in love, and always reaching toward something bigger.
In the years ahead, Caitlyn sees herself stepping into more spaces where she can thrive as a true multihyphenate, blending her love of acting, music, art, and Blackness into work that feels both revolutionary and deeply personal. She hopes that when people encounter her art, they feel at home, challenged, inspired, and called to dream bigger.