Diana Maria Riva on Skyline Chili, growing up on Cincinnati’s West Side
Diana Maria Riva is a Cincinnati kid to her core, and she discussed her roots in this iteration of Cincinnati Chili Chats at Skyline Chili.
Diana Maria Riva has worked in Hollywood since the ’90s, but the actress grew up on Cincinnati’s West Side.
She and her childhood best friend, Tina Paff, would ride their bikes around the area, stopping at United Dairy Farmers for slushies and to play Ms. Pac-Man. Once she was a little older, Riva remembers late nights at Delhi Township’s Skyline Chili.
“That’s where we would show up at 2:30 in the morning after the bars,” Riva, a Skyline loyalist, said over a four-way with onions at the new Fountain Square location. “That’s when you could go out and dance and drink all night and then eat a big plate of Skyline Chili afterwards and feel fine the next morning.”
Riva was a Cincinnati kid to her core.
“Whenever you run into somebody from Cincinnati in a different state, city, you identify from what parish did you grow up in,” Riva, a Saint Ursula Academy graduate, said. “It wasn’t to indicate anything except ‘Where in the city were you located? Did we cross paths and whatnot?'”
‘It kept the culture alive’
Riva is a first-generation Dominican-American, and she says growing up with her heritage in Cincinnati had nothing but bonuses.
She lived in a two-language home, and she would spend summers in the Dominican Republic. Neither could be said by her classmates in grade school at St. Antoninus School, she says.
“It kept the culture alive,” she said of her summer visits. “It kept the language alive for me, and it only fueled me for my career.”
And her career path started taking shape early. Paff said, while she was reserved, Riva shined on stage, even as the lead of their eighth grade play.
“She could already sing so well,” Paff said. “I remember our eighth grade teacher … was fascinated and like, ‘Oh my gosh, who is this student?'”
CCM took a chance on her − and it paid off
Riva says Cincinnati’s arts and culture scene has come a long way since she was a kid, but it wasn’t too common at the time for a child in town to tell their parents they wanted to become an actor.
“They might hear it in other towns like Chicago or New York or LA,” she said. “But I said it to my parents and they said, ‘OK, you just have to get your education; you have to get your training,’ which was the smartest thing that they could have recommended.”
Riva attended the University of Cincinnati’s College-Conservatory of Music for undergrad and graduate school. She finished grad school in 1995, and credits the college for preparing her to take on the wild world of Hollywood.
“I went in very green,” said Riva, who still returns to CCM to mentor students. “I didn’t come from a performing arts high school and a lot of those kids do. But they took a chance on me and I got trained and I matured and I gained responsibility and professionalism.”
“So, when I went out to LA, which was suddenly the Wild West, I went in with maturity and taking everything seriously and audition with professionalism.”
CCM awarded Riva with the Marian A. Spencer Mosaic Award in 2025 for the work she has accomplished in her professional career.
How a play at Ensemble Theatre led her to Hollywood
Riva’s big break came shortly after graduation. She was acting in a play at Ensemble Theatre in Over-the-Rhine, when the playwright took both her and the play out to Los Angeles a year later.
“I was going to go out there and do this play for a couple months for 25 bucks a week,” she said. “I thought, ‘Maybe I’ll get a commercial and make up for (the little money).'”
Her trip to LA, however, turned into a contract for her television debut: a role in the 1996 ABC sitcom “Common Law,” directed, in part, by industry legend Robby Benson.
“He took me under his wing and made sure that it was completely successful for me, so that was a pinch-me moment,” she said.
Riva has been in Hollywood ever since, appearing in numerous films and TV shows over the last three decades, including “Sabrina the Teenage Witch,” “The West Wing,” “What Women Want,” “Gordita Chronicles” and, most notably, “Dead To Me.”
In that Netflix hit, she starred as Detective Ana Perez alongside Christina Applegate, Linda Cardellini and James Marsden.
“‘Dead to Me’ was life-changing,” Riva said. “When you go in and you audition for something and you think, ‘This is what the role is going to be,’ and then the creator of the show is like, ‘I see more. I see more we can do with you.’ And then it becomes three whole seasons of this incredible arc, just because of how you inspired them to maybe think.”
Fighting for Latina representation
Through her years in the industry, Riva hasn’t limited herself to roles strictly designed for Latinas. She goes in and proves herself for a given role, “then if they wanted to make the role Latina after that, go for it.”
“A painter wouldn’t want you to tell them ‘You are only allowed to use chalks and acrylics.’ … As an artist, you want to use all mediums. You want to play in all mediums. You don’t want to be limited to because of your look or because of your cultural background,” she said. “So, I’m really proud of the way my career has displayed the culture and the fact that I’ve been given fair playing ground of opportunity to play in the different mediums.”
And she has done everything she can to help her fellow Latinas get that level playing field.
While she says there was a time when Latino representation in Hollywood was improving, Riva says “the depiction of Latinos on camera is” currently neither favorable nor accurate, and it “can break your heart” to see the number of leading and co-leading roles going to Latinos.
Riva launched Latinas Acting Up in 2023, which advocates “for representation in front of and behind the scenes for Latinas in all areas of performing arts and arts and entertainment,” she said.
“I don’t want a handout,” she said. “Nobody ever does. They just want an opportunity to go in and have an opportunity to play fairly with everybody else.”
‘How Hard Can It Be?’
Riva is also an advocate for women, specifically Gen X women experiencing midlife.
As she spoke to her friends in LA and her friends home in Cincinnati, Paff specifically, she started realizing they were often facing the same issues. Their location in the country didn’t matter.
“Although we had different daily lives, we were complaining about the same thing,” she said.
Riva said society puts them in a box of being over the hill, but she says they are either hitting their stride “or still trying to get up that last rung of what we want to accomplish in our careers.”
So, Riva launched a podcast with iHeartMedia, which is produced by Eva Longoria, called “How Hard Can It Be?” in which she talks to celebrity guests about those topics facing women their age.
Paff is also involved with the show, participating in “Happy Hour with Tina” mini-episodes in which she and Riva discuss the conversations in the latest episodes.
“Women are hearing this and thinking, ‘Oh, this isn’t just Hollywood celebrities. This is some no name in Cincinnati, Ohio, going through the same things,'” Paff said. “I think it provides unity that we need.”
What else can Riva accomplish?
Similar to the women she talks to on her podcast, Riva still has more she wants to accomplish.
The West Sider who once dreamed of becoming an actress even has a dream role.
“You saw ‘Wonder Woman,’ the first one? Robin Wright − running around with that sword, being an amazon, tearing stuff up,” she said. “I want to be one of those women on a horse or a dragon with a sword.”
And, in a ideal world, Paff would also be in this project.
“When she’s saving the world on her horse … I told her at the end of this scene, the end of this war, she’s going to come to the local pub. And that’s where I come in,” Paff said. “I’m going to be there with my apron on. She’s just going to come in and not order. She sits down and I just go get the drink. I just go get the tequila and I pour it. And we don’t even have words.”
“I have that gravitas,” Riva said. “So whether it’s mystical, mythical or historical, I want to do that.”