MEET TEACHING ARTIST, KAMYAR
AN INTERVIEW WITH INTERN, MICHIKO WILD //
MEET KAMYAR MOHSENIN
Kamyar’s first exposure to art was at an art studio in his hometown of Santa Cruz. The studio, Seven Directions, housed over 80 live exotic animals—African grey parrots, giant turtles, iguanas and hedgehogs—so that students could have access to drawing them, and Kamyar says that he essentially lived in the studio since he was four or five years old. His mother was supportive of his interest in art and bought him art supplies and comic books to encourage his passion. When asked what sorts of comics he read as a kid, he said, “everything”— DC, Marvel, Disney, manga, Tintin, Asterix, one-off graphic novels. He described sitting on the floor of a comics shop and reading comics for two hours at a time.
This early interest in comics also inspired him to make comics of his own. When he was eleven, he began writing twenty strip comic sagas of his own cast of characters, which he described as representing different aspects of his emotional state. “My mom looks back on it now and says, ‘This was your therapy. You definitely got through a lot of weird emotional states by just being able to draw it.’ And knowing that, knowing I was almost like my own therapist in a lot of ways by doing that, I see art as very therapeutic and very important for anybody of all age groups, but especially that 11-year old middle school age group, the same age group I’m working with.”
At around 12 years old, Kamyar had a transition from comics and stop-motion into filmmaking. He had been inspired by his grandfather, who was a photographer, to start taking photos, and was building skills in stop-motion animation. This meant he was ready when he was offered the opportunity to make an animated logo for a children’s book company. In return, he got a computer, and he began experimenting and learning about the digital techniques he teaches today. From there, Kamyar kept raising the bar. At 15, he made a 20-minute documentary on sustainability and human securities over two summers in the Dominican Republic. At 16, he challenged himself to make three short films in just three months. Meanwhile, he began working at the same art studio, Seven Directions, he had grown up in, doing summer camps for kids under ten.
When Kamyar came to Coyote, it was his first time teaching a class completely independently. “Coyote has totally changed the way I have thought about teaching, and how I do classes, and it’s so different in how I worked at Seven Directions…now I’m actually designing curriculums, and meeting a lot of different families, and working in different community spaces, and it’s been very profound and a huge growth spurt for myself.” Kamyar spoke highly of Coyote, particularly the program’s merit in providing freedom to instructors and the support he got as a new teacher.
At 22, Kamyar is also the youngest teaching artist at Coyote, but he emphasized that he really felt that age is just a number. “I learn a lot from them and I don’t want it to sound like I know what I’m doing, because they teach me as much as I teach them about what it means to be a human what it means to be an artist and how to grow up in a world like today.” Since he came to Coyote in 2019, he has taught filmmaking, cartooning, stop-motion animation and even a skate art class.
Though he was given plenty of support in the arts when he was young, he recognizes that this isn’t always where his students may be coming from and that the middle school age group he teaches can be having a difficult time. “It’s just making sure that the time that they are in class is super fun, super positive, enriching, they can come in feeling gross and dumb and whatever the world told them they were that day and they can walk out feeling like they’re an incredible artist and they’re better every time they come back…If I can give anything to these students with Coyote, it’s the ability for them to be themselves.”
Kamyar continues to work furiously on new and old creative projects, even in the midst of the pandemic. When COVID-19 hit, he was teaching five classes a week at different nonprofits and, at the time of his interview, was working on twelve total music videos he had filmed over the summer. He hopes to develop a clothing brand and plans to start freelancing in the coming year.