Her film career began a year later with Center Stage (2000), where she played a struggling ballet dancer. Saldana\'s breakthrough came in 2009 with her first of multiple appearances as Nyota Uhura in the Star Trek film series and her first appearance as Neytiri in the Avatar film series. Saldana also portrays Gamora in multiple films in the Marvel Cinematic Universe, beginning with Guardians of the Galaxy (2014).\n', '

Saldana was born in Passaic, New Jersey. Her father, Aridio Saldaña, was Dominican, while her mother, Asalia Nazario, is Puerto Rican. She was christened Zoe Yadira Saldaña Nazario, reflecting both her parents’ surnames. Saldana also has Lebanese and Haitian roots. With regard to her racial identity, Saldana stated, "There\'s no one way to be black. I\'m black the way I know how to be." She spent the majority of her early childhood growing up in Jackson Heights, New York. She was raised bilingual, speaking English and Spanish. She has two sisters, Cisely and Mariel. Their father died in a car crash when Zoe was 9 years old, and their mother subsequently moved with the children to the Dominican Republic.\n', '

Saldana discovered her love of dance in the Dominican Republic and enrolled in the ECOS Espacio de Danza Academy; she studied various forms of dance, but describes ballet as her first passion. She told Vanity Fair that she quit ballet because she did not "have the feet" and had too much pride and ambition to just be in the corps de ballet. The family returned to New York after her sophomore year in high school. In 1995, she began performing with the Faces theater group in Brooklyn, which put on plays geared toward providing positive messages for teens via themes dealing with issues such as substance abuse and adolescent sexuality. Concurrently, she performed with the New York Youth Theater; her appearance in their production of Joseph and the Amazing Technicolor Dreamcoat led a talent agency to recruit her. Her previous dance training, and her acting experience, helped her land her first film role, playing talented and headstrong ballet student Eva Rodriguez in Center Stage (2000).\n', '

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