When Nathaniel Grandinetti completed his organic chemistry final in December, it signaled the end of a valiant fall quarter as a junior Molecular, Cell, and Developmental Biology major at UCLA.
When Grandinetti wasn't balancing equations during the school term, he manipulated all kinds of objects into disappearing and reappearing. For some people, world-class magic tricks are easier to conquer than synthesizing carbon compounds.
Grandinetti, who is also a math minor on the premed track, is the co-president of the Magic & Illusion Student Team @ UCLA (MIST). This steadily growing, student-run organization is composed of both general members and active performers–students of all majors who are seeking to hone their magician skills.
“I consider myself more of a hobbyist,” Grandinetti says. “Currently, I don't really make any money off of my magic. I have here and there. But with that being said, MIST has been more of a professional endeavor in magic for me . . . For just this quarter, we've made about $1,500 as a club doing magic.”
MIST was recently invited by UCLA’s Anderson School of Business to perform for the institution’s top donors, the club’s first performance of such caliber.
Some of the club's past gigs found its members collaborating with the UCLA Alumni Instagram page to create video content, performing at a UCLA-hosted "First Thursday" block party event, and in front of child patients at the Ronald Reagan Medical Center. They are even starting to perform at private parties in the larger L.A. community.
Between life-guarding and leading campus tours, Grandinetti somehow finds the time to practice magic in the most prestigious little league there is: the Academy of Magical Arts’ (AMA) Junior Society.
Commonly known as The Magic Castle, the AMA is the hub for L.A.’s best magicians. Its Junior Society offers a chance for magicians under 21 to exchange knowledge and learn from the most successful magic experts.
Grandinetti applied through Zoom while staying at his family’s home in Sacramento, virtually performing a five-minute card trick for the judge’s panel.
Like a modern-day jester, Grandinetti equips himself with a deck of cards before going out at night because 1) no one is going to freak out more about a mind-bending magic trick than drunk college kids and 2) there’s always a chance that a taquero may give Grandinetti a taco on the house after watching him do a sick impromptu trick.
David Shao, a former Magic Castle junior member, describes the venue as “the holy place for magicians.” Shao was 15 when he joined a magic club in his home country of China.
At 17, he immigrated to the U.S. to study drama at the University of California, Irvine, maintaining his magic skills throughout undergrad. Shao joined the AMA Junior Society as a sophomore in college.
A decade later, Shao is now a professional magician specializing in close-up and parlor-style magic. He may walk around a room, navigating between attendees to perform card tricks for them right at their table. Or he may be in the middle of a crowd, predicting an audience member’s thoughts–and getting it exactly right.
During one of these psychic tricks, Shao was forced to improvise after forgetting to bring in an essential prop. He was supposed to guess the word an audience member was thinking of by revealing the word written on a piece of paper. Without the correct tools, Shao sent himself into a backstage frenzy where he had less than a minute to conjure a makeshift solution.
“I just took out another piece of paper, and then I wrote some Chinese in it,” Shao says. “And then later I came out, I said to the audience, ‘What is your word again? It's ‘talk’? Here, this is ‘talk’ written in Chinese.”
This became a recurring gag, and now when a crumpled sheet displaying a random Chinese word shows up in Shao’s shows, it’s on purpose.
Known for his deadpan delivery, Shao remains “straight-faced all the time” while in character. Sometimes it takes weeks for Shao to practice a new line, ensuring he won’t crack a smile when it’s finally time for him to perform it onstage.
He subverts typical magic-speak, playing with expected conversation cues to power his matter-of-fact style of humor. Shao performs tricks, but part of the magic comes from his ability to use language as a tool, all while executing sleight of hand.
According to Shao, his parents were hoping he’d become a doctor or lawyer, holding out hope even as he pursued a drama degree. Once Shao became a member at the internationally acclaimed Magic Castle, his parents’ support seemed to grow. Plus, headlining your own TEDx talk can definitely help legitimize your job to your parents if they didn’t understand it before.
After falling victim to a couple of empty promises from a producer of "America’s Got Talent," Shao now aspires to appear on TV's long-running “Penn & Teller: Fool Us” series.
"Every year they say it's their last season, and then it keeps coming back,” Shao says.
Professional magician Katrina Kroetch, aka Magical Katrina, performed for the show’s namesake hosts in a 2020 episode of “Fool Us,” where she was lauded for her skills in redirection and vibrant originality.
Kroetch presented Penn with various photos of potential “dates,” asking him to choose who she should agree to go on a date with–like a tactile version of a dating app.
When one final suitor was selected by Penn, it was revealed that his photo was the only one with a green check on the back while the rest were marked with black Xs. It wasn’t until Penn deliberated with Teller that he realized how Katrina pulled the trick off.
Originally from Portland, Oregon, Kroetch got her start in the world of magic in the Bay Area, where she worked as a princess for children’s birthday parties.
“I grew up watching "Buffy the Vampire Slayer," and I always really loved that show more than, like, "Spider-Man" or "Batman" or "Superman," Kroetch says. "Because I was like, ‘She looks like me.’ She's wearing a skirt and she's kicking ass, you know.”
Like many women who grew up idolizing Buffy Summers, Kroetch had an affinity for the occult as a young girl. Combined with her love for performing onstage, the magic industry presented itself as the perfect career for Kroetch.
“When I was a little girl, I loved witchcraft and witchy stuff, and would do little spells, you know, when I was like 11,” Kroetch says. “So it all coalesced into this perfect career for me. It all made sense when I discovered magic as a career. I was like, ‘Oh, my God, this is so many different things I love that I get to do every day.’”
Since entering the world of magic, Kroetch has won multiple awards and performed on television shows like “Blippi.” She even starred alongside Chappell Roan in the artist's “Red Wine Supernova” music video. As of December 19, 2025, the video has reached over 26 million views.
“I think that seeing representation, someone like you, someone that identifies like you do, doing something powerful or high-status is really important for little girls to see, and little boys–they should grow up and be like, ‘Oh, anybody can be a magician, right?'" Kroetch says.
When Kroetch isn’t shooting on set, she may be performing in magic festivals, at colleges, or on cruise ships. Next July, Kroetch is performing a self-written show at the Melbourne Magic Festival.
“It's gonna be a spy-themed show,” Kroetch says. “I feel like spies and magicians do a lot of the same stuff. Like they break out of handcuffs, they can send secret codes, they're really good at poker for some reason.”
In 2023, The New York Times reported that only 8% of professional magicians are women. That same year, LAist reported that 12% of The Magic Castle’s members were women in 2019. To help contextualize these numbers, the gender makeup of professional magicians resembles architecture and engineering industries in 1984, according to the American Institute for Boys and Men.
“But being a female magician hasn't been a smooth ride,” Kroetch says on her website. “The magic industry, like many others, can sometimes be unwelcoming to women. I've faced my fair share of underestimation and bias.”
Kroetch says that some people accuse her of booking gigs simply because she is a woman, seducing potential clients.
“I get a lot of men and women in the magic community saying that my success comes from my sexuality, which I think is really ironic, because I would say 90% of my clientele is straight women in corporate America,” Kroetch tells L.A. TACO. “I befriend them on the phone and make them laugh.”
Some performers are trying to create community spaces for women magicians. Within The Magic Castle, there is the Women Magicians Association.
“The WMA is a group for women magicians to foster friendship, learning, skill development, and to help make us all better performers. We also do outreach to encourage women and girls to become more involved with the art of magic,” its website reads.
“I do a lot of magic for little boy and girl birthday parties,” Kroetch says. “I do think representation matters. I know that sounds cheesy to say, but when I was a little girl, it really did matter to me a lot.”
Jacob Martinez, an 18-year-old from Palmdale, specializes in mentalism, accurately guessing strangers’ birthdays, the names of audience members, and other pieces of information that once usually holds to tightly.
Martinez started performing at The Magic Castle when he was just 13, six years after learning his first tricks. His first venture into magic came when his parents gifted him and his older brother a magic kit for Christmas eleven years ago.
“I saw the attention [my brother] was getting from my family, and I think I just kind of wanted that,” Martinez says. “So I started doing [magic], but then he quit after like a week, and, you know, eleven years later, here I am.”
His past work trips include visits to Sweden, London, and North Carolina. He says it’s likely he’ll be performing in Australia and Florida in the near future.
Martinez has teamed up with another prodigal magician based in L.A., Aidan Corcoran, to perform shows as a duo. They became friends at Tannen’s, a summer camp for youth magicians in Pennsylvania.
“It's meant for mentoring [camp-goers] to try to become professional,” Martinez says. “So, you go and there's a bunch of professionals who are like the best in the world, and it's not like you're learning tricks for the week. It's sort of like you get to talk to them and workshop your ideas, learn how to write, and learn from people that have walked that path before.”
In November, the pair performed a show at the Illusion Magic Lounge, raising money for St. Jude Children’s Research Hospital to fight childhood cancer. The idea came to them after Corcoran told Martinez about his uncle’s recent cancer diagnosis.
“ … [Cancer] had always been something that was like, in my life, like, my grandma passed from cancer,” Martinez says. “So when we heard all these things, we're like, ‘Dude, we should do that show and use it to raise money for charity.’ So we ended up doing that, and we sold out the theater, and it was awesome.”
This year, Martinez and Corcoran will be performing a week-long nighttime show at The Magic Castle, an extremely impressive feat since members of the Junior Society are typically only allowed to perform during weekend brunch shows. Martinez says that it’s easy for older magicians to write him off because of his age, but that changes after they see him perform.
“I think young people are much more in touch with what's going on in the world and that kind of thing,” Martinez says. “And I think that the worst thing in magic and mentalism in general . . . is a lot of performers are kind of, like, not human, and that they're kind of, like, on a pedestal onstage. And it's hard to connect with a performer who is just, like, a god-like figure, almost. And I think that a lot of the young people are doing a really good job at just being a person first.”
New generations of magicians are combating outdated stereotypes that say magic is reserved for straight White men. Organizations like MIST are increasing accessibility to the knowledge of tricks and mentorship from more experienced magicians.
Kroetch thinks it’s due time for the magic industry to be celebrated by others outside the magic industry.
“I think there's some really important things out there that are bringing magic in the spotlight, the song “Abracadabra” by Lady Gaga, the TV show "Penn and Teller’s Fool Us,” the new “Now You See Me” movie . . . Like, people need to know magic's cool. [Magic] needs more mainstream media and people talking about it, and it being elevated as an art.”
If aspiring magicians didn’t have the gall to pursue such an unpredictable industry, the world would be a lot less whimsical and interesting.
Sure, there’s another universe where Katrina pursued her dreams of performing on Broadway and Jacob followed through with electrical engineering school, one where David paid his parents’ concerns more mind, and Nathaniel completely dedicated himself to his premed studies; but that would make for less people in L.A. riding the minutes-long high that comes after being mind-blown by a magician.
And if you’ve been living in L.A. for the past year, you know we can use all the magic tricks we can get these days.
