Miami Beach celebrates 16th annual Pride festival (includes video story)

Miami Beach showed its true colors at this year’s Pride Parade on Ocean Drive Sunday.

The event began in 2009 with celebrities such as Mario Lopez, Gloria Estefan and Adam Lambert. This year’s grand marshal and headliner was Billy Porter.

This celebration of arts and culture included a two-day festival and parade, featuring special events, family-friendly community activities and social mixers.

The events started on April 2. Some featured plans were the Miss Miami Beach Pride Pageant, Pride Flag Raising Ceremony, Pride Lights the Night, Social Justice Health and Wellness, and two days of the festival and parade.

These past two weeks represent a lot for the drag community as well. 

“I love Miami Pride because we can share with everyone what it means because people think that being gay is a little dark, weird, but you know it’s all just fun,” said Victor Frida, an attendee. “You can come here and have a fun time.”

Daniela Zulueta is pursuing her master’s degree in global strategic communications and graduated from FIU with a bachelor’s degree in digital broadcasting in 2023. She also holds an associate’s degree in journalism from Miami Dade College. Zulueta loves the city of Miami and aims to share the stories of the citizens who live here and all over the world. Zulueta runs a social media platform called @Lifestyle_Miami where she works with local businesses and does community-based work. She had a paid internship with Televisa Univisión as a Step Producer and worked as a stage manager at NBC6 South Florida & Telemundo51. Now, she is part of cohort 8 and has a fellowship at the FIU Ratcliffe where she can work on branding herself and post-production of a podcast called Tech Conversations.

Parsa Sadjadi specializes in video editing, graphic design and videography. He also loves a good adventure where he can find good stories.