We caught up with the brilliant and insightful Uros Markovic a few weeks ago and have shared our conversation below.
Hi Uros , thanks for sharing your insights with our community today. Part of your success, no doubt, is due to your work ethic and so we’d love if you could open up about where you got your work ethic from?
I’ve been professional dancer for almost 3 decades, and at the start of my career, I learned pretty quickly that without putting in the hard work myself, the results wouldn’t come. Besides going to different training camps, classes, traveling to different countries for extra education, I quickly learned that I have to put in hours and hours of work myself…. In other words, I quickly learned what it means to be an athlete…and this mindset helped me in every professional aspect of my life to achieve success. Even in modeling/acting, I realized that you have to put in hard work yourself to develop your skill set and that beside having an agent, talent agency that represents you and your work, you have to do hard work yourself on promoting you and your brand. Being an athlete, definitely molded my work ethic.
Great, so let’s take a few minutes and cover your story. What should folks know about you and what you do?
I was very fortunate to have a very successful career as a professional dancer, as well as career of international model/actor. I’ve been National Champion in Latin and ballroom dances and I worked with brands like Cristian Dior. I professionally developed in Japan, China, New York where I lived and my work brought me to 55 different countries around the world. Finally two years ago, I decided to move to Los Angeles because I wanted to be at the center of entertainment world and create a new playground for my career. Moving to a totally different country at the time felt exciting, but I quickly realized that it’s like being reborn and starting from Ground Zero which was at the time very challenging because I was already developed artist, and suddenly it was time to prove myself and start from scratch yet again. After two years of being in LA and working with the brands like Gillette, Toyota, Oreo, US army… Shooting a national and worldwide commercial for Chevrolet… working with A-list celebrity artists like Pink, The Future, Vivica Fox… and shooting a short film as a male lead with Kelsea Ballerini … made every effort and every challenging time worth it. I started 2024 with joining SAG-AFTRA, and I am very excited to be a part of this prestige union of extremely talented artist and find my place in it.
Looking back, what do you think were the three qualities, skills, or areas of knowledge that were most impactful in your journey? What advice do you have for folks who are early in their journey in terms of how they can best develop or improve on these?
Dance is definitely the skill that had the most impact on shaping me as an artist… it brought me so much joy, knowledge and life experiences. I fell in love with it at the early age but my love for it developed with my personal development. As I mentioned earlier, it gave me athlete mentality, taught me how to work hard, how to deal with failures, how to pick myself up and keep going , to be resilient, how to set goals and how come when the one road is filled with hardships and challenges to still stay focused on your goal, but find a side road to it… how to be open-minded, how to be creative… how to look at life from a lighter perspective… How to be an artist… my advice for young folks would definitely be to explore and find what their “dance” is… something that moves your soul and it makes your heart beat skip, because only when you find that you can easier deal with all the challenges that being an artist brings.
Any advice for folks feeling overwhelmed?
Through whole life you have situations when you feel overwhelmed, and this never changes… You just learn with different techniques how to tame it down… it’s a training for mind… For me personally the techniques I use changes with the circumstances but most of the time my mind training comes from training my body… I like being active, because being active makes me put in control into my breath…makes me put in control into how my body operates , and with that my mind, too.
Contact Info:
- Instagram: https://www.instagram.com/uros_nbg/
- Youtube: https://youtube.com/dancer1987la
Image Credits
Normandy Europa, Vinh Pham, Salvador Fuentes, Kateryna Shkytska, Leland Glauz
