Kym McDaniel is an interdisciplinary artist working across fields of experimental moving image, choreography, and disability studies. Her films have recently screened in solo and two-person screenings at UnionDocs – Center for Documentary Art (Queens, NY), Arts + Literature Lab (Madison, WI) , Cellular Cinema (Minneapolis, MN) , Rhizome DC (Washington, DC), and the Society for Disability Studies Conference, as well as in group exhibitions at Ann Arbor Film Festival, Slamdance, Experiments in Cinema, Antimatter, the Whitney Humanities Center, and Alchemy Film + Moving Image Arts Festival, among many others. Her research has been supported with grants from the New York State Council for the Arts, New York State Choreographer’s Initiative, New York Foundation for the Arts, and Mary L. Nohl Greater Milwaukee Foundation.

Her research is rooted in feminist addresses of the self, often using text, voiceover, montage, and performance to investigate the personal, cultural, and political implications of living in a body with chronic pain. Her choreographic and filmmaking practices are informed by Crip Theory and neurobiological theories of trauma. She presented her research on "memory recall" at the Beyond Trauma: Interdisciplinary Conference on Moving Beyond a Traumatic Past in Nice, France (2025) and is currently in the process of writing The Camera and My Neck: The Choreography of Chronic Pain, a chapter contribution within the volume The Handbook of Dance and Disability (Oxford University Press). Ultimately, her practice is a method of resistance and healing outside of power structures (e.g. the medical industrial complex, the dance/dance film field, etc) that typically insist upon one way of embodying the world.

As a collaborative media artist, she has created films, projections, and texts with choreographers, theater companies, somatic practitioners, disability artists, and scientists. She co-presented, Experimental Narratives: Bioarchaeology and Filmmaking in Practice at the European Association for Archaeologists in Belfast (2023) and was invited to co-write the chapter, ACTING QUEERLY: Creative Collaboration in Applied Bioarchaeology in the edited volume, Applied Bioarchaeology (Springer, 2025). She has recently collaborated on videography and editing projects with Petra Kuppers (University of Michigan, Ann Arbor), Luc Vanier (University of Utah), Elizabeth Johnson (University of Maryland, Baltimore), and Rebecca Nettl-Fiol (University of Illinois Urbana-Champaign). 

As a curator, she has programmed interdisciplinary dance and film/video events across the US, most recently in Milwaukee, Minneapolis, Salt Lake City, and San Francisco. She was lead curator for the 2024 Screendance Cultural Tour at the Salt Lake Film Society, a film festival in collaboration with the Salt Lake Film Society, Tanner Humanities Center, and College of Fine Arts at the University of Utah. She also founded EXPS/SLC (Experimental Series – Salt Lake City), a screening series centering experimental films created by BIPOC, women, and queer filmmakers. Monthly screenings were free and open to the public at the Union Theater at the University of Utah.

She currently has two films in progress: weightless – an experimental film exploring memory, chronic pain, and embodied shame, and when the calls fade – an autoethnographic experimental film that draws queer connections between orca whales and chosen family. More information on her recent projects and films can be found on her website and/or Vimeo. 

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