[3] Acosta was born in the Washington Heights neighborhood of Manhattan in New York City, to a 15 year old single Black Dominican mother.
[6] In the summer holidays, Acosta attended American Dance Festival at Duke University, where he began to find his voice as a choreographer.
[5] Between 2009 and 2010, Acosta took a break from dance to discover himself, and came out as transgender, as he began to understand why it had felt hard to identify as a female dancer.
[8] For his piece Discotropic featured in the Triennial at the New Museum, Acosta was inspired by the made for TV film that appeared in 1978, Star Wars Holiday Special.
Speaking to Vice Magazine, Acosta says that through this reperformance of the piece, he explores sci-fi film with a "specific focus on Black American experience, and then how I see and rework that as a queer, trans-identified person in the contemporary world.
[12] The artists created a venue of soft, luxurious, comfortable spaces where people of colour were invited to enjoy the rest that is often withheld as privilege.
drawing concepts of archetypes from film, musicals, songs, and choreography creates a base for me to begin identifying our self diagnosed impossibilities.