Nine months after making Hollywood history, Michaela Ja Rodriguez is ready to smash additional barriers in film, television and music.

This summer, Rodriguez followed up her breakout role on Pose by joining Maya Rudolphs Apple TV+ comedy Loot . She also returned to the recording studio to put the finishing touches on her debut EP , a hybrid pop and R&B confection thats aimed squarely at the dance floor and is slated for release next year.

Rodriguezs portrayal of house mother Blanca Evangelista on Pose won her critical acclaim, and in January she became the first transgender person to win a Golden Globe for that performance.

The New Jersey native, who is Afro Latina, has been an outspoken LGBTQ rights advocate for the duration of her career. The global fame that Pose brought, however, has encouraged her to amplify her philanthropic efforts. This fall, she has partnered with Citi and Mastercard to promote the Chosen Name campaign , granting account holders the ability to use their chosen name on credit and debit cards.

First introduced in 2020, the program has been hailed as a major step forward for transgender, gender-nonconforming and nonbinary people, whose legal name may not align with their true name on other documents. Prior to 2021, the feature was only accessible to those who underwent a legal name change.

In honor of the campaign, HuffPost spoke with Rodriguez about her latest projects, the iconic Broadway role shed like to play and her hopes for the future of transgender representation in Hollywood.

Congratulations again on your history-making Golden Globe win for Pose. Now that its been nine months, how do you feel about that achievement in hindsight?

I didnt really celebrate that much at first because I didnt know how to. But now Im celebrating and Im enjoying [that success]. I like seeing the timeline, the steps I took to get there. My peers have experienced it, and theyre telling me: Enjoy it, girl, because its fleeting. It passes. Enjoy it right now. And thats what Im doing.