RON GARZA is an international Body artist/author/photographer/educator who has been been professional piercing since 1992. He is self taught but has trained and worked with Allen Falkner, Bear Belmares, Steve Joyner, amongst many other to help him perfect his craft over the last 30 years and is a current and active member of the association of professional piercers.
He is also well know for his detailed scarification design work that he began offering to public in 1996, and received an award for “Advancing the art of scarification” from his colleagues at the second SCAR CON convention for changing the industry with his detailed graphic based scarification design work. He also hosted the first ever International Scarification convention in 2013 in London England which the first time scarification artists from the US, UK, Scandinavia and Europe were all working under one roof.
In 2005, after years of help with Brian Skellie, Ron began putting together a curriculum of freehand piercing information with videos, that were released as a set of DVDs and became the stepping stones that helped take freehand piercing to where it is now.
He also one of the original members of arguably the first body suspension performance group ever – TSD (Traumatic Stress Discipline) and has done suspenions for many TV programs such as : Ripley’s believe or not, Chris angels mind Freak, Discovery channel Guinea pig, Discovery’s Discover, amongst many other programs. He has also done suspensions work for bands such as Marilyn Manson and Black Sabbath amongst many others.
From 2006 – 2009, he also was one of the only westerners to ever participate in the Phuket vegetarian festival and actually pierce the possessed spirit mediums, walk on fire, take care of them after and do the festival as a priest assistant. This he did for 3 years.
In 2006 he gave the first scarification class ever, and since then he has taught many classes international as well as domestically on a number of subjects from many aspects of piercing, freehand piercing, branding , microdermals, and of course scarification.
When not running his busy piercing studio Sacrament Body piercing in Lake Forest, California, he loves to travel, teach and help develop the next generation of body artists worldwide.
Please visit his website at RonGarza.com to read different articles he has written and see where he will be teaching next.