A black and white thermal printed image of Kym, a light-skinned femme person. Her hair is middle-parted and pulled back in an elastic. She wears a white tank top, and is gesturing with a hand raised up towards her face. Her palm is towards the camera, mid-movement. Rooftops of Lisbon, Portugal are behind her. Photo taken by Lenneke Wispelwey, 2025.
Kym McDaniel is an experimental filmmaker and interdisciplinary artist working across fields of moving image, choreography, and disability studies. Her embodiment as a dancer living with chronic pain informs her relationship to time, the body, and movement in her work.
Her research is rooted in feminist, Crip, and queer addresses to the self and culture. She has recently screened at the Ann Arbor Film Festival, Slamdance, Antimatter, ICDOCS, The Whitney Humanities Center, Alchemy Film & Moving Image Festival, and at UnionDocs, among others.
She has an MFA in Cinematic Arts from the Department of Film, Video, Animation, and New Genres at the University of Wisconsin-Milwaukee and an Advanced Certificate in Disability Studies from the City University of New York.
She and her cat, Lemon, live in Columbus, Ohio. She teaches film/video as an Assistant Professor in the Department of Dance at The Ohio State University.