Photo Credit: Jess X Snow
Kayla Briët (she/they) is a filmmaker, artist, composer, and creative technologist exploring themes of futurity and belonging. Originally from Cypress, CA, she was previously based in Taipei, Taiwan, and is now based in Los Angeles. With works spanning film scores and documentary to virtual reality installations and music technology, she aims to amplify muted stories and write love letters to the diaspora communities she grew up in.
In film music, she aims to accent emotion on screen, scoring films exploring truth and reconciliation, queer environmental futures, and decolonial love—including Dear Georgina, a follow-up to the Emmy Award-winning film DAWNLAND (2018). Her directorial work has been exhibited and presented by MoMA, PBS, The New York Times, SXSW, VIFF, ImagineNative and SWAIA, among others, and archived in the Smithsonian NMAI digital collections.
Her VR installation TROVE is a digital archive exploring collective memory and our affective relationships to objects, and was supported by the MacArthur Foundation x Sundance Indigenous New Frontier Fellowship. She directed and shot the 360 film Ways of Knowing, which held its world premiere at Diné College before screening at SXSW and is currently on the festival circuit. She has also been selected as a TED Fellow, Asian Cultural Council Fellow, and Bespoken Composers Fellow, and shared live performances at Konzerthaus Berlin as a STOPOVER Fellow and connected with an international music community as a OneBeat and Found Sound Nation fellow.
A proud graduate of Fullerton College, Kayla explored Black, Asian, and Indigenous computing histories with a focus on music technology as a graduate researcher at the MIT Media Lab. At USC, she is a first-year PhD student in Media Arts + Practice, where her research focuses on fabrication, physical computing, world-building, ancestry and self-expression through music technology.
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