Anna DeGuzman is a whiz with a deck of playing cards.
With an Instagram following of more than 90,000 and a popular YouTube channel where she posts her latest card tricks, she is affectionately known as “The Queen of Cardistry.”
Her brand of close-up magic will be on display during her six-week residency, from Feb. 19 to March 29, at Pittsburgh Cultural Trust’s Liberty Magic in the Downtown Cultural District.
DeGuzman, 21, originally from New York and Bergen County, N.J., has lived in Los Angeles for three years, where she has worked on perfecting her skills, initially performing mainly for trade shows and special events.
Cardistry mainly was a popular form of street magic until performers like DeGuzman realized that intimate sleight-of-hand card tricks can be filmed in videos and magnified through the use of large video screens for personal appearances.
Ready for live stage shows
She said she is now ready to break out into the next performance level. Her engagement at Liberty Magic will be her first visit to Pittsburgh and her first live stage show.
“I started with my videos and people started reaching out to me to do my entertainment live,” DeGuzman said in a phone interview with the Tribune-Review. “You really have to see it in real life to believe it.”
Like many kids, her introduction to card games started with Go Fish and War and progressed to poker and blackjack. Her cardistry skills are self-taught.
She was 15 years old when she started watching cardistry videos and learning all she could about card juggling and flipping cards around.
“I was like, ‘I can do that,’ ” she said. “I taught myself flourishes and moves and started making my own videos. I knew that I had something that no one else in the room can do.”
Facing the pros
Her career took a large leap when the CW network aired her appearance on “Penn and Teller: Fool Us” in 2019. The show is a competition program in which magicians perform tricks in front of the magician-comedian duo Penn and Teller.
Her first TV appearance was on a former MTV series, “Amazingness!” in 2018.
DeGuzman is ready to add more touring and more traveling to her performance schedule.
“I’d love to have my own headlining show in Vegas. There’s also a huge community of magicians in Europe and Asia. I want to travel and see the world,” she said.
Breaking the mold
She is determined to be a performer who is “breaking the mold” when it comes to the public’s perception of old-school magicians.
“I’m not the old magician with the top hat and gloves. I dress like myself,” she said. “Magic’s hot. I think magic makes you interesting.”
Some of her cardistry can be tricky, involving special effects that have risks involved.
“I do a stunt with a fish hook tied to the end of a rope. I have four ropes in my mouth and I hope that they pick the right one,” she said. “I try to be careful and not hurt myself.”
DeGuzman said her engagement in Pittsburgh will feature “a very intimate show where everyone is involved.”
