My name is Kyle and I can’t express myself in any conversation. But when I’m writing, creating a character and bonding with them on a level that is so personal, gratifying, and spiritual, and then breathing life into that character from the pages of a screenplay to watching trusted actors interpret it all, it is everything I live for. It is my whole life.

It didn’t take me long to realize that while I adored the dream of film, the fantasy of a narrative, and the iconography of classic genres like The Western, I could never identify with cinema’s exhausting overuse of the “male gaze” nor could I care enough to really write any convincing cis-male characters. Writing not only became a passion, but an addiction: I didn’t like being a boy, so I wrote girls. My process of creating a character was never to move a plot along – it was to become one with the nuances, desires, and identity of another human. Writing empowering women was liberating – it wasn’t just something I wanted to do, but something I had to.

In the early stages of my non-binary transition, my girlfriend at the time took me to a Velvet Underground exhibition in New York City. It was at a point in my life where I was convinced I had been through the worst, and had no idea it would feel like the best compared to what was about to happen to me in a few months. But this one particular memory in between the chaos contains an awakening in me. It was something of dissonant beauty that I had never experienced before: a gritty, visceral collection of visual and sonic art from the Velvet Underground and a whole seedy underbelly of similar inspired artists which would later become my vocabulary. We sat in cold, stark screening rooms, watching the darkest areas of the psych unfold before our eyes: assaulting, industrial, violating… I could’ve sat shivering on that rock-solid screening bench all day. What perhaps spoke to me most was not once did any artist attempt to apologize for their work: instead, they punched you in the face with it. And finally, Nico’s harsh yet captivating tone as she spoke with such directness: “I regret nothing, except being born a woman and not a man.” I finally felt understood.

Thankfully, I felt understood again in life, but in a different way: from the faculty of UT’s FMX department who have taken the time to get to know my artistic vision and ambition, and offered countless new background and experiences to expand them forward. Aaron Walker, Cynthia Savaglio, Warren Cockerham, and Santiago Echeverry are just a few of many teachers who I owe an incredible thanks to: they have given me rational hope that there is a place for someone like me in this industry during a time in my life where I often feared that there wasn’t even a place for someone like me in the world. They gave me a safe space to search places in my art and self where I may otherwise have been too afraid to ever look. I found this catharsis in many more places down the road: Sputnik, Anna Von Hausswolff, Kristin Hayter, Jamie Stewart, Gregg Araki, Céline Sciamma, Debra Granik, and Bette Gordon to name a few. They showed me how to turn my life into art, unapologetically, and capture everything from the pain of it to the hope I know is there and still hold onto.

It’s hard living in a world where you are constantly in fear of how people will respond when you tell them what gender you are. It’s hard to speak when someone else is listening and you’re learning how to cope with anxiety, which is why if you meet me now you’ll see I’m rarely this assertive. I’m often turbulent, quiet, and cooperative, but hopefully you find that my work expresses the confidence I sometimes appear to lack. Because where I could just shout in life, I’d rather hold it in until I feel like I’m going to implode: that’s when I’ll gladly take my suppression and expand it into something transcending… That’s when the art comes in.