Not everyone gets to say that they danced alongside BLACKPINK’s Lisa. But then again, online sensation Niana Guerrero isn’t just anybody.
In a short TikTok from March, the two perform “FVCK UP THE WORLD” with the synchronicity and familiarity of long-time teammates. “But I remember telling her before we started that I was so nervous, and she had told me that she was nervous too. Imagine that!” Guerrero tells Teen Vogue over Zoom. It’s not her first celebrity collaboration — far from it, actually. In the past year alone, she’s been spotted with KATSEYE, Meghan Trainor, and Tate McRae. Nevertheless, she still gets the same onslaught of comments with each video drop: “How do I be you? You’re so lucky!”
To chalk it all up to luck, however, would be a disservice to the 19-year-old dancing queen. Guerrero is currently the Philippines’ most-followed TikTok creator with over 45 million followers (and around a billion likes). Her virality extends to YouTube, where an audience of almost 16 million subscribers has watched her grow up.
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The most chronically online among us might recognize Guerrero as the baby girl bopping along to “Despacito,” while her older brother Ranz Kyle drove her to an undisclosed location. Running a little past a minute long, it soon spawned a dance craze in the same vein as the Harlem Shake and landed the sibling duo a slot in the 2017 YouTube Rewind, an annual video series featuring the hottest trendmakers of the past year.
Born to a family that valued and nurtured talents in the arts, Guerrero was a shy kid in Manila who turned to movement as a means of self-expression. Her earliest home videos show her trying to imitate Michael Jackson’s distinct dance routines. Behind the camera was her brother, who already had a past life as a member of the Filipino boy band Chicser. (Guerrero’s debut video appearance was actually in their 2011 cover of “Teach Me How to Dougie.”)
Kyle found something special and funny in his little sister’s innate talent, and he began featuring her in his videos as he made the jump to vlogging. Post-”Despacito,” Guerrero’s parents decided to homeschool her. “Initially, I really didn’t think about the views, followers, likes, or anything. I wanted to share my love for dance and show our family spending time together,” Guerrero says.
The pandemic marked yet another turning point in Guerrero’s burgeoning career: like the rest of us, she was grooving to “Say So” and “Supalonely,” but in a more capable fashion. Her feel-good trendsetting content soon introduced her to a new audience in search of light in dark times. Guerrero says that many of her most-replicated dance challenges, like “Booty Wurk,” and “Give It Up,” come from just surrendering to a beat that takes over her body. “Surprisingly, my dance trends that go viral are the ones that just come out of nowhere: I’d be playing the song in my room and then all of a sudden, a choreography would come to mind,” she says. “I’d upload it and then be totally shocked the next day that so many people decided to try it too.
Similarly, the vlogs she posts to her channel of 15 million subscribers don’t follow any specific formula. She gravitates towards content of her parents and siblings bonding together, which resonates with her family-centric Filipino audience — even as they’re ignoring their baby sister Natalia or turning Ranz’s room into a ball pit as a prank.
It was only a matter of time before this effortless authenticity attracted some of her favorite artists. While some collaborations are business deals with terms that are negotiated from the start, many of these interactions started with them sliding directly into Guerrero’s DMs and building a foundation of friendship. It’s safe to say, though, that no moment beats getting noticed by her long-time celebrity crush.
“When Jungkook followed me, I started jumping in my room because I couldn’t believe that it was true,” she says with infectious enthusiasm about BTS’s youngest member. “I even messaged him and said, ‘Oh my god, is this true?’ and when he replied with ‘Yes!’, I freaked out again.”
Last February, yet another BTS member took notice of Guerrero: J-hope both followed and shot her a message, asking if she could teach him how to use TikTok. (The two mutuals even met up during his recently concluded Hope On The Stage Manila leg.) “I was literally in the car on the way to an event when I saw it through a tweet, and I had to check if it was real multiple times because I couldn’t believe it at all,” she says. “BTS is the best K-pop group ever to me.”
Among her other admirers and past collaborators include NCT Dream, Sabrina Carpenter, and even Chef Gordon Ramsay, whom she was “honestly terrified” of back in childhood. (“He’s way nicer than we all think,” she says.) I ask her lightheartedly if she’s going to take this as her first foray into food, which makes her break into a laugh. Probably not, but she’s very willing to explore other fields.
As avid viewers of her livestreams would know, Guerrero has always dabbled in music. It was once an annual tradition for her to collaborate with Ranz on songs centered around the same message of positivity and empowerment. But now, she’s eager to discover what other genres she could pursue.
Current collaborations with Louis Vuitton and BYS Cosmetics also point to her growing influence in the world of fashion and beauty: “I’m trying to be more intentional with the way I present myself, so I’m experimenting a lot right now,” she says. “I’m taking a lot of inspiration from what I see on Pinterest and TikTok and trying to inject my own flavor based on what I’m comfortable with.” We get a sense of her eclectic sensibilities on her Instagram: one day, she’s Cupid in a crimson bodysuit with an accent belt, only for her to dress down into her signature statement tee and sneakers the next.
Unlike her approach to dance, Guerrero’s outlook towards life is less based on vibes. “I think it’s important to go with the flow but I do appreciate structure. I’ll let things happen in a natural way but when it comes to choosing which people to keep in my immediate circle, carving out a space I can be comfortable in, making my own schedule, and having a say in my recent projects, I want to be more conscious now.”
Influencers may find it hard to strike a balance between the personal and public-facing, especially when every moment can be monetized. But Guerrero has never felt the need to follow any trends, or cave to the demands of the majority. “I think it’s easy to get caught up in what people expect of me, but in the end, I always do what feels right for me,” she says. “I want to stay true to who I am.”
Even though her career is pretty much in full force, Guerrero has no plans of letting her personal goals take the backseat. Some of the items on her bucket list for the year? Going to Coachella; exploring Paris; and meeting the likes of Tyla and Jungkook.
Of course, as someone who grew up in the public eye, she also strives to attain simple joys, such as traveling with her close group of friends. “I never got to have sleepovers growing up, so when my friends and I went to Japan and stayed in the same Airbnb, it was the closest I had ever gotten to that experience,” she says. “I loved shopping the whole day and getting home and doing little hauls with them. It was so memorable for me.”
I ask her if there’s anything jarring about having the entire archive of her life available online for public viewing, but she’s never seen it that way.
“I’m grateful that people have seen different versions of me over the years,” Niana Guerrero says. “And though my interests and style and mindset will evolve, I’ll grow and document as I go.”
