If you’ve ever danced in Miami — really danced — there’s a good chance you’ve felt David Sinopoli’s presence without even knowing it. You’ve felt it in the perfectly-timed drop between Questlove and Toro y Moi at Bardot. You’ve felt it walking into III Points as the bass from one stage blends into the hum of a visual installation. And if you’ve lived in this city long enough, you’ve probably realized that Sinopoli isn’t just booking acts, he’s fine-tuning Miami itself.
I say this as someone who owes a lot to him. My own musical taste, my career as a writer, even my sense of what music could mean in a city like ours — all of it was shaped by what he and his team brought here. Bardot was where I first learned to trust a curator. You didn’t check the lineup; you just went. You knew it would be good because he was behind it.
The Early Frequencies
When I ask Sinopoli about his earliest memories of music, he doesn’t name a band so much as a feeling. “It was my older sister,” he tells me. “Christine played piano — self-taught — and she was really into trip-hop. Björk, Portishead, Tori Amos. I was listening to Wu-Tang and 2Pac at the same time.”
It makes perfect sense once you know him. That early mix of grit and ethereal elegance became the blueprint for everything he would later do. The masculine urgency of East Coast hip-hop met the atmospheric, emotional swirl of electronic music, and somewhere in the middle, David Sinopoli started building his own language.
Gainesville: Where the Vision Took Shape
Before Miami, there was Gainesville. The scrappy college-town laboratory where Sinopoli threw his first events. He studied public relations at the University of Florida, but his heart was already in the nightlife. “I started throwing a lot of events in Gainesville,” he says. “They were more nightlife-driven, but we were always toying with rock and roll nights, indie, LCD Soundsystem stuff…just seeing what was happening out in L.A. or Miami and trying to make our own version.”
Gainesville gave him the muscles for what would later become III Points: a belief that a scene could be built through sheer love of music, and that community was as important as curation.
And when the Gainesville chapter ended, he packed his car, prayed it would work out, and drove to Miami. “I remember thinking, this has to f**ing work,” he says. “I was broke, my Jeep had just been in an accident, and I was running on fumes — literally.”
The Bardot Years
It worked.
In 2010, Sinopoli became music director at Bardot, a living room of a venue that would go on to define a generation of Miami nights. “My first shows were Toro y Moi, Miike Snow, Questlove…” he recalls. “We made a lot of noise that first year.”
Bardot was where his curatorial intuition crystallized. He booked with emotion, not algorithm. The kind of selector who could draw a thread from J Dilla to Fela Kuti to Nicolas Jaar and make it make sense. The lineup was eclectic but intentional, stitched together by feel. “Everything I’ve ever loved has moved me,” he says. “If it doesn’t move me, I can’t play it, I can’t book it.”
For those of us who lived through it, Bardot felt sacred. Like the city’s secret heartbeat come to life.
III Points: Building a Universe
By 2013, that heartbeat had grown too big for one room. Sinopoli co-founded III Points alongside Erica Freshman, a festival that would merge music, visual art, and technology into something entirely new.
“I did kind of a research project when I moved here,” he says. “What’s going on in the scene? Who’s playing? What I found was that a lot of bands just didn’t feel like they had enough support here.”
III Points was his answer: a love letter to Miami and an invitation to the world. The first edition was citywide with events in Wynwood galleries, screenings at O Cinema, installations that blurred sound and sculpture. It was messy and chaotic and utterly magical.
Over a decade later, the festival has grown in scale without sacrificing any of its soul. “I’ve fought really hard to keep 60% of the lineup money for artists people don’t know yet,” he says. “Because that’s the point. We’re about our city. People who play here that aren’t from Miami — they’re the minority. This is for us.”
The Man Behind the Music
What makes Sinopoli singular isn’t just his insane resume, it’s the way he moves through all of it. He’s gentle in conversation, almost shy, but when he talks about music, his eyes light up with the spark of that same 10-year-old who stayed up all night downloading 30-second previews on Napster.
Music, for him, has always been a spiritual escape. When he was 18, he spent six months in isolation during a bone marrow transplant. “It was a really psychedelic, transcendental moment,” he tells me. “I had to grasp death, and escaping through music became my shelter. Movie scores, hip-hop, anything that could take me somewhere else.” From his findings, he crafted now-legendary mixtapes for friends, one of which was the direct link that got him the gig at Bardot.
That experience redefined what music meant to him. “It’s my escape again,” he says softly. “When the business side gets tough, I dig back into the music. I DJ, I make playlists, I listen. It keeps me alive.”
He pauses. “Sometimes I think maybe I did die back then,” he admits, referencing a code-blue moment he experienced in the hospital. “And this — this life, doing what I love — is the world I designed for myself. My happiest thing to do.”
The Legacy of a Scene
To talk about Sinopoli is to talk about Miami itself. Its scrappiness, its contradictions, its glow. He’s carried this city’s music scene on his back for over a decade, not because he had to, but because he couldn’t not.
From Bardot to Club Space to III Points, he’s built stages that feel like extensions of his heart: imperfect, alive, inclusive, spiritual. And in doing so, he’s made Miami a destination not just for parties, but for being present.
There’s a quiet poetry in that. A man who once escaped through sound now creates spaces for others to do the same. What keeps a musical juggernaut like him inspired? “The people around me. The music itself. I still want to be on that dance floor. That’s who I am.”
More Sinopoli Nuggets
White Whale Act
“Aphex Twin.”
Acts He’s Most Excited About This Year
“L’Imperatrice, Ca7riel & Paco Amoroso, Turnstile, Amyl and the Sniffers, Boy Harsher, Sean Paul, Despacio — it’s a wild range this year. The Magami Orchestra in the middle of the festival — that’s going to be insane.”
The lineup is set. The city is ready. All that’s missing is you.
Don’t miss this year’s @iiipoints — grab your tickets now at the link before the beat drops.
All Photos by Maria Juliah.
