GiaNina, Unfiltered: from Broadway prodigy to Gen-Z multi-hyphenate and why she’s still just getting started

• In a frank, funny conversation on Debated with Jordan Kensington, the 20-year-old dancer and creator retraces a career that began at nine, detoured through Broadway and a Hollywood musical, and lands squarely in the noisy now of social media fame on her terms.

  Contents

  A childhood that clocked on at curtain upDance Moms, global oxygenThe internet as workplace—on her rulesThe ethic behind the outputFame, filters and the futureWhat success looks like at 20

  A childhood that clocked on at curtain up

  GiaNina Paolantonio was nine when showbusiness stopped being a dream and turned into call times. “Seven shows a week for two years… I had to be at the theatre three hours early to warm up and put my wig on by myself,” she says on Debated, half-amazed at her younger self’s stamina. That schedule wasn’t play-acting it was Broadway, where she joined Matilda the Musical after an open call that began as a dance audition and escalated through lines, songs, and even “are you afraid of heights?” questionnaires.

  The next breadcrumb came in 2017 with The Greatest Showman a small dancer role that still felt “the coolest thing” to a kid on a film set.

  Dance Moms, global oxygen

  If Broadway was training ground, Lifetime’s Dance Moms (Season 8) was the amplifier. “It made me internationally known in six months,” she says. The show’s reach folded into touring and teaching and, crucially, a direct line to audiences she could keep without gatekeepers.

  The internet as workplace—on her rules

  Paolantonio’s social footprint is large, but the operating manual is the point. TikTok is for goofy spontaneity; Instagram is the curated résumé. Variety keeps her out of a niche: choreography, concert clips, even cleaning her apartment—“longevity comes from letting people into your day-to-day,” she says.

  There are boundaries. Social media, she argues, “has already become a bit of a disaster” for mental health—not in a pearl-clutching sense, but in the basic loss of empathy when typing to a human you can’t see. Her fix: block liberally, filter comments, and curate a community “like your house.” If someone’s shouting in your hallway, you show them out.

  The ethic behind the output

  Two forces made the worker: a mother who was also her dance teacher (“always encouraging, never the mom-ager cliché”) and a father who drilled the unfancy bit—“when you start something, you finish it.” The result is an artist who talks about “faith in myself” less as mantra and more as muscle memory: open calls, self-tapes, class after class in LA, a Nickelodeon job here, a recommendation there, and momentum that “felt like the city where dreams are made.”

  Fame, filters and the future

  She laughs off a red-box question about exes (“I don’t have one”), dodges conspiracies (cloud seeding is a no), and offers a surprising seasonal hot take: autumn and winter beat summer rain and all. The music map that made her spans J.Lo and Usher to contemporary singer-songwriters when the mood tilts introspective.

  The present tense is kinetic. She’s on the road teaching and guesting and, as she told Debated, “coming to London… Pineapple Studios” building the in-person feedback loop that social can’t fake.

  What success looks like at 20

  At the core of the Debated chat is a working definition of success that dodges virality: show up, do the reps, don’t outsource your taste. The internet may rewrite distribution, but it can’t shortcut the hours. Paolantonio knows because she logged them early—in a wig room at nine, in a film rehearsal at twelve, on a reality set at thirteen, and in countless classes where the only algorithm was the mirror.

  If you want the headline version, she gives it to you herself: nothing’s impossible, the worst you’ll hear is “no,” and if you get that “you go elsewhere.”