Kaitlyn Mikayla
Kaitlyn Mikayla
Just five days after graduating high school in 2011, the Michigan-bred photographer and filmmaker Kaitlyn Mikayla moved to New York on a whim. She took a gap year to soak up the city before enrolling in film school through Full Sail University’s online program, supplemented by summer courses uptown at Columbia University, then decided that the best way to actually learn was by doing. “I was cheeky,” she laughs. “I would go to a bunch of film companies and tell them I’d already graduated. No one did any research.” They didn’t need to; Mikayla’s talent was evident.
She worked at Magnolia Pictures and as a producer’s assistant while simultaneously honing her craft. “I told myself, ‘I’m going to be on set every day and learn how they’re run,” she recalls. “‘I’m going to write on the side and start to develop my visual eye.’” Hustle she did, landing gigs for brands like Juicy Couture, Nautica and Sports Illustrated Swimsuit Issue—and as Shaquille O’Neal’s personal photographer. She constantly carried her Super 8 camera and shot behind-the-scenes footage. “I knew the brand wasn’t going to want to pay for it,” she says. “But then I would edit [the footage,] and they’d end up wanting to use it.” The strength of her vision has similarly been validated via her Instagram account, which now boasts more than 55,000 followers and “blew up into this thing I was suddenly shooting for full-time.”
After 12 years in New York, Mikayla relocated to Los Angeles. But before she fully settled in, she made another bold move, this time heading to London. She packed her new Hasselblad camera and set off on a six-month “artistic sabbatical, for lack of a better term.” During this time, she developed one of her most lasting projects by way of a “complete fuck-up.” Gemini Rising, a double exposure series wherein subjects become ethereal twins of themselves, was created when she forgot to turn her camera’s film during a photoshoot. While conducting “at least” five shoots per week, Mikayla began to focus on another venture—the script for a film called Ragamuffin.
“I grew up racing motocross, so I knew I wanted to tell a story about this part of my life,” she elaborates, revealing that she wrote the first draft at 19. It’d been about seven years since she revisited the material, but the day she returned to L.A., she resolved to get serious. She linked up with Juice Box Films, a woman-run production company based in both L.A. and Atlanta. Originally hoping to make a feature right out the gate, Mikayla instead decided to make a short as a veritable proof of concept.
Filmed at a track in Georgia amid real races, the short follows Ryan (Eden Harper), a 12-year-old aspiring rider preparing for a big race. She helps run a traveling gear stand with her dad, a former champion now well past his prime known as Mad Mike (played by Robert Hadlock but named for her father who, unlike this character, is “not a party animal”). The 14-minute short finds Ryan confronting budding queer desires, her father’s playboy tendencies, sexism within the sport and, perhaps most damaging, the fact that she might not have talent. Shot on film, Ragamuffin recalls the work of Andrea Arnold and Sean Baker, both major influences for Mikayla. “I wanted to take a slight docu-style approach,” she says, specifically because she has seen so little of the sport on screen. “We had Charlie’s Angels: Full Throttle, which was, like, one scene,” she chuckles. “I wanted it to feel like it was an environment that I was thrusting the audience into.”
Ragamuffin world premiered at Sundance earlier this year, where Mikayla says the reaction from audiences was encouraging. (“The main sentiment has been, ‘Where’s the feature of this?’”) After screening in Park City, the short was invited to the American Pavilion’s Emerging Filmmaker Showcase at the Cannes Film Festival. Plans to shoot the feature-length version are imminent. “Today, we’ve just gotten our second offer,” she reveals when we speak via Zoom in July. “We’re probably going to shoot next year.”
Another short that Mikayla directed, Stockholm Street, is currently in post-production. Co-written by Lily Greenwald and Jenna Harwood, the erotic thriller explores “the gray areas” that exist in the realms of kink and consent. “The films I want to make are about badass women,” she concludes. “I like things to be a little bit provocative, but for me, this ties back to growing up in this male-dominated world of motocross and trying to make space for myself. Whenever I’ve pushed against what I was told to do, it has been successful. Taking risks is really the most important thing in this world.” —Natalia Keogan/Image: J P Cheuvront
