taken by Madison Stonefield 2023
Gabriella Mykal is a West Indian American visual artist and filmmaker. Through film, video installation, writing, and sculpture, her work treats personal trauma as an access point to humor and social hyperreality. She combines narrative and experimental techniques to explore radical vulnerability, femme friendship, romance, and sexual dysfunction as grounds for political discourse. Found footage and unreliable narrators craft a vibrant, Cyberfeminist sensibility.
Mykal obtained her BFA in Visual Art from Southern Methodist University (SMU) in 2020 and her MFA from the California Institute of the Arts in 2023, where her thesis film Rape Play received the Allan Sekula Social Documentary Fund Award, the 2023 Collection Award from the Archive of Documentary Arts at Duke University, and premiered at Atlanta Film Festival (Atlanta, GA) in 2024.
Mykal’s recent work has been shown in and screened at PROOF Film Festival, 33 Girona Film Festival (Girona, ESP), Squeaky Wheel Animation Fest (Online), Photophobia Contemporary Moving Image Festival (Online), Bogotá Experimental Film Festival (Bogotá, CO), Sweet Pass Sculpture Park (Dallas, TX), 500X Gallery (Dallas, TX), The Museum of Color (Austin, TX), MicroActs Artist Film Festival (London, UK), Extremely Shorts Film Festival (Online), The San Diego Underground Film Festival (Online), That One Film Festival (Muncie, IN), Scopophilia Arts Festival (Amsterdam, NL) and The Tainted Love Film Festival hosted by the SMU Meadows Museum where her film, when the party’s over, won the Tainted Love Venus Award.