Today we’d like to introduce you to Wyoh Lee.
Wyoh, can you briefly walk us through your story – how you started and how you got to where you are today.
My penchant for making things, extreme curiosity, and a lack of fear around typically taboo topics cause many to mistake me for a “free spirit,” but I’m actually slowly-but-surely working to create content across different media that gives permission to shed shame and live more loving, creative lives.
In fact, it’s my extremely practical farm girl upbringing that is the stable foundation beneath the roller coaster of being a freelance artist that is now my life. I grew up surrounded by orange groves instead of neighbors and was raised by a dentist and a nurse who met in the Air Force with values of community service, treating others kindly, and doing a job right the first time. I was taught to be a problem solver, not a problem maker, to always bring whatever fruits or vegetables are ripe in the garden if I am visiting a friend, and that chores must always be completed by 18.00h or my books would be taken away.
Yes, I am now often nude on the internet and speak very openly about very personal details in my sex life, but it’s the safety and love I was raised with that allows me to do this work. I wasn’t raised as an artist but also was never dissuaded from creative exploration. I did just about every craft imaginable growing up but kept my burning desire to be an actor largely to myself after asking my mom if I could move to Los Angeles when I was eight (she said no).
It is my private, personal commitment to acting that has shaped each decision in my life. I went to film school, wanting to understand my industry of desire from all angles and told people I wanted to be a producer or a director without understanding what either of those jobs actually entailed. I became a cocktail server as soon as I was twenty-one so that I was bartending by the time I graduated since I’d heard that was the best job for actors to have flexibility-wise.
I made my first web series to get SAG eligibility after graduating, then decided that a feature film would only be a bit more work. I wrote, produced and starred in that feature along with my best friend and ongoing creative inspiration, Lauren Fitzgerald, and we finished post on it 14 months after starting our first draft. I booked a couple of other (unpaid) indie films and quit my bar job when I couldn’t get time off to film the second one. Thus, I began my freelance scramble. If I didn’t know how to do something, I taught myself, and this is how I ended up designing websites, doing book layouts, creating pitch decks and logos, writing commercials, hosting a live-stream cooking show, editing reels, shooting photo and video content, and eventually producing and directing projects for other people. All the while, continuing to hone my skills as an actor with classes, workshops, and diligent rehearsal.
It was voice class that changed my life. At twenty-five, I felt stupid for not knowing that voice lessons weren’t just for singers, and learning that “breath equals sound equals emotion” from my wise-and-gentle teacher, Matt Beisner, is something that I will be forever grateful for.
This was also when my life as I knew it fell apart.
My first two years of studying voice work overlapped with the two seasons I spent producing and directing online reality television for pickup artists, and it was only a few weeks into feeling all my feelings that I realized I was queer – I fell in love with a femme-bodied person for the first time, in spite of the fact that I also had a boyfriend I loved very much. Loving two people at once did not compute with the traditional values I’d been raised with, so I (poorly) applied the (questionable to begin with) advice from the dating coaches I was working with and made a complete mess of my personal relationships.
Just after my twenty-seventh birthday, two years into feeling my feelings, it was abundantly clear to me that I was living a life that was not in line with my own integrity. I wrapped the second season of the show, shaved my head, and for the first time in my life, gave myself permission to leave Los Angeles with a one-way ticket. I wandered around South America, grieving the years of work and exhaustion that felt like they amounted to nothing. I gave myself permission to consider what a life might look like if I weren’t bending over backward trying to keep my days free for all those callbacks I never booked; I hear a lot of actors lose their drive for the craft as a career in their late twenties, and I assumed my time had come.
I was wrong.
Instead, some little voice in my head started whispering that I really should start painting. I abandoned a pair of socks to make space for some watercolors and colored pencils in my 35 liter backpack. And then ideas for shorts, TV shows, and features kept trickling into my head. It was amidst the alien landscape of the Bolivian Salt Flats that I knew it was time to go back and make things again, less than six months into my grand journey.
But I promised myself that, going forward, I would only accept money for creative work I really believe in. I became a photographer full-time upon my return and started editing and producing a new podcast, The Radiance Project, with my long-time friend and creative collaborator, Heidi Rose Robbins.
The following January, the coverage of a date Aziz Ansari had gone on with a woman who used the pseudonym “Grace” and the polarizing fallout from the resulting opinions was so horrific, I felt called to do my part that we as a society do not know how to talk about sex. I had recently become acquainted with the explicit communication of the kink world and wanted to create a safe space for people of all backgrounds to begin to practice sharing both the physical details as well as the emotional context for intimate experiences. So Sex Stories was born, and since then, my work has become more focused, purposeful, and weird.
I’ve started writing fantasy novellas to self-publish, just finished a draft of a book of questions for lovers to ask each other, am working on a one-woman show aimed at college campuses (someday, when they reopen) centered around curiosity and consent, I take nude photos of myself and others to celebrate our physical being, and wiggle every day to make sure we celebrate even the wiggly parts. And eventually, I will make my body-loving sci-fi horror comedy musical about a wiggle virus that takes over the world.
My mission is to support myself and others in prioritizing self-love and creative expression so that we can be more available to love one another. Yes, I truly believe that, collectively, we can make the world a better place with sex and art.
Great, so let’s dig a little deeper into the story – has it been an easy path overall and if not, what were the challenges you’ve had to overcome?
My enthusiasm, curiosity, and desire to make things lead to a repeating pattern of overwhelm and burnout, which takes constant vigilance and relentless self-care to mitigate. The downside to my dedication, focus and drive is that it causes me to submerge myself into and endless tunnel of to-do’s, and it took four actual months of solo quarantine for me to realize that I’m not merely productive – I’m an actual workaholic. The downside to being an artist is no one will ever initiate an intervention here, they’ll simply praise you for being prolific.
Balancing money jobs, passion projects, a personal life and also trying to do “fun” things separate from passion projects is very wobbly, and publicly talking about my private life has made dating harder, and COVID-19 adds another layer of tricky to all those things.
I have a big vision for how I’d like this work to unfold, and often have to remind myself to take things one day at a time. Luckily, almost a year into freelancing, I am getting less uncomfortable living in the unknown.
Alright – so let’s talk art / work. Tell us about Wyoh Media – what should we know?
In late January 2020, I finally decided to establish my very own creative umbrella and formed Wyoh Media, LLC to cover my work as an actor, writer, director, photographer, podcaster, painter, designer and other creative work I do.
Podcast-wise, Sex Stories exists because I was looking for a sensitive sex podcast where I could learn from other peoples’ experiences and the details of their thoughts and feelings. I didn’t want shock value, I didn’t want sex-negativity in an attempt to get a laugh, I didn’t want advice, and I wanted more details from people whose experiences are different from my own so that we can all try and learn why the heck sex is so hard for people to talk about most of the time.
Photography-wise, Wyoh Photo (f.k.a. Karin Schneider photography; Wyoh is my artist name because there was already a Karin Schneider in SAG and already a bunch of Karin Lee’s on redbubble) started from a place of wanting to support my fellow actors with affordable headshots. By offering fifteen-minute sessions in (pre-COVID) weekly “headshot parties” and shooting based on time, not the number of looks, I encouraged actors to get specific about the photos they needed and helped them accomplish a lot in a small amount of time by starting each session with a short breathing exercise, and then directing them with character thoughts based on their goals for the shoot. Instead of getting anxious about how they look, most subjects (even some of my non-actor clients) feel more permission to drop in and play – even if that play looks very serious because we’re shooting hyper-serious dramatic theatrical shots.
No matter what creative work I’m doing, the key is specificity, tailoring each job to the needs of the client.
Is there a characteristic or quality that you feel is essential to success?
Whether I am interviewing someone for Sex Stories, working with a headshot client, shooting content for a brand, writing a story (or film or book), designing a website, or painting a commission, I never lose sight of the overarching goal. I’ve honed my ability to ask clarifying questions to make sure that I understand the vision of whoever has hired me and holding that in mind is what shapes each step of my creative process, whatever form it takes.
For my own projects, I keep my original vision in mind but must constantly check in with trusted friends, family and audience members to make sure that I still make sense to other people – I have to make sure that I don’t go so far into my own weird artist sex bubble that I forget my farm girl self.
It’s my ability to drop in with people, listen to their wants and desires, and then support them in those (and maybe encouraging them to dream just a bit bigger) that brings me delight and satisfaction when I work with others.
Pricing:
- Private Sex Stories Recording | $75 – $175 {{Similar to an episode of Sex Stories, but just for you or a loved one}}
- One-Hour Outdoor Photo Shoot | $300 {{Client must have access to *private* outdoor space to refrain from violating Statewide mask requirements; additional hour +$200}}
- Hand-Painted Natal Chart | starting at $195
- Send a Friend a Tiny Circle of Hope | free
Contact Info:
- Website: wyohlee.com // sexstoriespodcast.com // schneider-photography.com
- Email: [email protected]
- Instagram: https://www.instagram.com/wyohlee // https://www.instagram.com/sexstoriespod // https://www.instagram.com/wyohphoto
- Other: https://www.patreon.com/wyohlee
Image Credit:
Wyoh Lee, Lauren Crow, NFMLA
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