Every voice actor will tell you that the work is about becoming someone else. For Erica Muse, becoming someone else was never just craft — it was survival. Long before her voice reached millions of anime fans as Cinnamon in “One Piece,” Kannazuki in “The Fruit of Evolution,” and Ivy in “Aphmau,” stories were the place the Dallas-born performer went when the world became unbearable. Today, she describes her mission with a single, quietly devastating idea: everyone deserves an escape, and she intends to help provide it.
Muse’s life divides, as survivors’ lives often do, into a before and an after. In May of 2015, she was drugged and abducted from a birthday party — a trauma she has chosen to speak about openly rather than bury. In its aftermath, the modeling and solo sales work that had defined her early twenties no longer felt safe. What remained was the thing that had carried her since childhood: the refuge of fiction. “In my darkest moments, stories were my escape,” she has said. It is a sentence she does not deliver as a slogan, but as a fact of her own endurance — and the reason she now considers simply making it to the next day something to be proud of.
The stories had been there from the beginning. She was five years old when she first performed in Christmas musicals at her Dallas grade school, eight when she fell in love with costumes watching her father build his own for Halloween, and twelve when she began sewing beside him. Bullied as a child, she discovered that the noise drowned out when she became someone — or something — else. Her first anime convention in 2006, attended in a costume of her own making, revealed a world where transformation was not merely tolerated but celebrated. After a lifetime of school uniforms, conventions became her favorite place on earth.
The road back after 2015 ran directly through that world. Invited to guest at a convention as a cosplayer in 2017, she crossed paths with Josh Martin, the voice of Majin Buu from the “Dragon Ball” franchise, and a realization struck: she could become a voice in the very anime, video games, and cartoons that had once saved her. Voice classes followed, then improvisation training, then graduation from the John Casablancas Center in 2018 and representation with Linda McAlister Talent. By February 2020, she was a full-time working talent — and she has never looked back.
The career she rebuilt from that spark is now one of the most versatile in Texas. Her voice threads through “Attack on Titan,” “My Hero Academia,” “My Dress-Up Darling,” and dozens more titles for Funimation and Crunchyroll, most recently as Grit in “The Ossan Newbie Adventurer.” Gamers know her as Gwyn in the acclaimed shooter “Selaco” and as the Snow Kitten Bastet skin in “SMITE.” On screen, she has taken starring turns in “Insane Like Me?” and “The Texorcist,” with credits stretching to the Universal Pictures feature “All My Life.” Yet ask her what drives it all and the answer never changes: children and adults alike rely on these mediums to laugh, learn, and cry together, and she wants to be part of that.
Nowhere is that purpose more visible than on the convention floor, where Muse — owner of more than 200 costumes and once a guest or attendee at 34 conventions in a single year — has become one of the circuit’s most cherished figures. Having arrived as a fan in 2006, she works deliberately to keep those spaces welcoming to all. Her stated goal at every event is simple: make sure everyone she meets leaves happy. Her 2026 appearances, including Dallas Comic Show’s tenth-anniversary Spring Spectacular and Seijin Otaku Fest in Colorado, continue that promise.
There is a particular alchemy in an artist who transforms the thing that saved her into the thing she gives away. Erica Muse found refuge in stories when she needed them most, then fought her way into the booth so that someone else — some kid being bullied, some survivor making it to the next day — might find the same door open. “Helping provide them makes me feel whole,” she has said of the stories she now brings to life. In an industry full of voices, hers carries something rarer than range: it carries proof that the escape is real, because she is living evidence of where it leads.
The official website for Erica Muse may be found at https://www.ericamuse.com