Meet Lexi Lee

Today we’d like to introduce you to Lexi Lee.

Thanks for sharing your story with us Lexi. So, let’s start at the beginning and we can move on from there.
I’ll start by saying that I’ve got the privilege and good fortunate to have a family that’s been willing and able to offer me material and emotional support when times are particularly rough. Despite this, my creative journey has not been a walk in the park. My family’s support has limits and I’m constantly working to find new, healthy ways to cope with the various ripple effects of my neurodiversities on my life. I live with the classic trifecta: ADHD, anxiety and depression. It’s also incredibly likely that I’m somewhere on the Autism spectrum; I’m actually in the process of seeking affordable diagnostic options.

Growing up, the only careers I got to see modeled and celebrated for me as successful ones were those with straightforward and traditional progressions. My parents went to college for physical therapy and became physical therapists. My aunt went to college and became a banker and got promoted until she was a bank exec, then retired in her 60s. A linear career path was the only thing my family knew how to steer me along and it ended up feeling like they were expecting me to learn to drive an off road motorcycle on city streets when all their lessons for me were on how to drive an automatic car.

As a neurodiverse, creative person growing up in a family of practical minds, I grew up with a certain idea of what being a “real adult“ meant and what that looked like and the deep, nagging sense that I could never actually achieve it. In my mid twenties, while I was in the midst of a quarter life crisis that involved moving back in with family to escape an abusive relationship and a lot of insomnia fueled video games binges, I arrived at the realization that my neurodiverse brain was never going to provide me with the means to create what I had been taught was a “normal adult life.” This was terrifying to consider and in therapy I struggled with feelings of helplessness and panic. At home, alone, I would often go into anxiety spirals that would leave me physically and mentally paralyzed – these experiences are part of the reason I’m passionate about mental healthcare access for creative communities. I would drag myself to the small handful of work shifts I could cope with and deflate entirely once work was over.

With so little energy to be independently creative and with my self esteem still in the post break up toilet, I even began talking myself out of applying for jobs I was qualified for. My anxiety kept whispering in my ear, “If you can barely handle a few service industry shifts and you can’t make your own work, how can you ever have a regular life?!” This situation (and my therapist.) made me ask myself if I even wanted that “normal adult life” to begin with. I thought about the careers and lives of the people I admired most and discovered that very few of their stories were linear either. So I asked myself: if the careers you admire are often unconventional, why are you trying SO hard to walk conventional career paths that clearly don’t suit you?

I knew then I needed to stop going after jobs that I thought other people might want to see on my resume and start chasing the kinds of jobs I wanted to do, in work environments that played to my strengths, with the kind of people I wanted to work with. I no longer stay silent about current events or hesitate to commit to a project that I want to work on for fear that it’s niche nature might put off a future employer, because I’m confident I’m choosing projects with the right people for the right reasons.

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?
For years I stuck with more traditional jobs that I wasn’t very good at because they felt reliable. I rarely did creative projects: I had the absurd idea that if anyone recognized my abilities in one area, I’d never be able to work on anything else. So I consistently sold myself short and second-guessed myself and passed up applying to a lot of great jobs. I had no idea what I was doing and I wasn’t okay with that. After deciding in my early twenties to quit my 9-5’s, bail from my abusive relationship and move back in with family to save money for graduate school and having a quarter-life crisis that involved a lot of insomnia and video game binges, I realized I didn’t have to know exactly where I was going in the long run to do good work in the present. I began to ask myself what the life I wanted to build looked like in a very literal sense and what values I wanted to live it by and then ask myself what actions I could take on a daily basis to get there. I’ve decided that for me this involves advocating for mental health support, equity and inclusivity in the arts and society. If life imitates art (and I believe it often does), then artists have a responsibility to use their art to help bring life to a society that is more diverse, resilient and empathetic. Some days I do better at moving towards these goals than others.

Asking myself these questions has lead me to some of my most memorable and successful projects, as well as some of my favorite creative collaborators. I’m currently navigating the ever-shifting landscape of COVID Era entertainment and finding new ways to stay connected with everyone I’ve connected with professionally over the last few years. Current projects include a digital cabaret with my circus studio and an ongoing effort to set up infrastructure to host small creative teams on a property in North Los Angeles county. The site has been used over the years for film locations and photoshoots and now, with the Covid-19 shutdowns causing the postponement and cancellation the live events and gathering spaces where artists would normally be invited to showcase their work, I hope to provide an affordable venue at which they can do so without the risk to the public that the usual venues would run. I still have no idea what I’m doing. That doesn’t bother me now.

We’d love to hear more about your work and what you are currently focused on. What else should we know?
My versatility has probably landed me most of my jobs. It’s certainly lead me to my favorite ones and it’s what’s helped me book work even during the times when I was struggling and self-sabotaging my own career with indecision etc. I’ve done everything from assistant coaching an after school kids’ theater program to body doubling for a pop singer in a Sony music video. I got my start in entertainment production by being elected student co-producer of my high school theater company. At the same time I was volunteering as a scenic painter for my local community theater and occasionally hopping around Hollywood taking a few Intern/PA gigs with an old family acquaintance who was an audio guru and ran his own company, which, at the time, did the sound for Dancing With the Stars and several other popular studio shows. I took what I learned about playing liaison between on site crews and production offices and assisting directors to my college theater program by senior year I had produced, cast and directed two short plays and an original piece and Assistant Directed an opera directed by noted theater historian and director Simon Williams.

Soon after graduation, I began working as event staff at red carpet and corporate events around the Greater LA area and took on theatrical director and assistant director roles with a number of independent theater productions. One was a fantastically dark and funny production of Mr. Marmalade (think Drop Dead Fred but rated R) that got nominated for Broadwayworld LA’s Best Non-Touring Show and two of my Hollywood Fringe Festival directing endeavors earned Producer’s Awards for high attendance. As much as I enjoyed directing, I began to realize that I dearly missed working art department and was tired of aesthetic decisions being made without me. I was worried that if I started taking multiple types of entertainment jobs, I’d be seen as flaky or uncommitted and have trouble networking and getting hired. Finally, I got to a point where I realized that I wasn’t interested in working for people who couldn’t appreciate my unique resume. I stopped worrying about “being the right fit” for a job and just looked into any opportunity I found interesting that I thought I had the skills for. If it was weird, funny, feminist or socially aware and I thought I could do the job, I went after it.

That approach has led me to an associate company membership with the Sacred Fools Theatre after crewing an absurdly funny production of the dystopian future feminist farce called “Denim Doves” by Adrienne Dawes, a spot on the art department crew for the recent Weedmaps Weed Museum installment in Hollywood, multiple music videos and photo shoots, an aerial duet performance for a Madam Ghandi private event, a Production Designer gig for an immersive show Produced by my aerial duo partner, mermaid performance gigs at fairs and private parties and set dressing for a special fundraiser by A Club Called Rhonda. Last year I decided to organize a pod of mermaids, make water conservation awareness signs and take the whole lot up the Feather River in Northern California to a festival called Sunset Campout. Coordinating with the festival Art Director and four cast members in two different cities on top of making sure all our costumes and gear arrived as planned was an incredibly rewarding challenge. I’ve worked on everything from corporate events to music festivals to art shows and family entertainment: it’s equal parts hectic and liberating.

Lately, I’ve been leaning towards acquiring fabrication and design skills and working in more art departments and my versatility and adaptability are still paying off. My most recent production was cut short by the first COVID shutdown and despite not getting to finish it, it’s one I’m still incredibly proud of and grateful to have been a part of because it’s a perfect example of every aspect of my work ethos. I was contracted by East West Players to work in their art department as their Prop Weapons Master for their production of the Sondheim musical “Assassins”. This meant full responsibility for the maintenance, storage and handling of the prop guns being fired on stage. I had to oversee movement with weapons on stage, supervise all live fire during rehearsals and was the one pulling the trigger for every offstage gunshot in the script. I’ve known the Arts Education Director of the EWP theater company since high school and she knew that my dad who grew up in rural Washington had taught me gun safety since elementary school, how to shoot rifles and handguns before I was a teenager and had me do some training with veterans and retired police detectives on further safe firearm conduct. She was confident that the combination of this and my directing background made me the person for the job.

The idea of having the cast and crew’s safety in my hands was daunting but I knew I had everything I needed to do the job well. It was shaping up to be one of the most rewarding jobs of my entertainment career. I adored both the cast and the crew, had developed a thorough and efficient system for handling the prop weapons and live blanks we used as ammo and couldn’t wait to get into the rhythm of a month-long run. A couple of days before opening, we got the news: Our show was never going to open. All events over 50 people had been canceled. We did a final performance that was a preview, opening and closing all in one show and I’ve never had such a bittersweet experience before. I still don’t quite have words for that night, but I know it will probably stay with me for the rest of my life. I still don’t have adequate words for it. Since then, I’ve been adjusting to the shift to almost exclusively digital entertainment and focusing on my mental health. This is a tough time for people with mental health issues – check in with your loved ones, people, not everyone knows how to ask for support. Although I’m still catching my bearings, it’s a shift in energy and direction I’m learning to enjoy that also happens to be providing me with a set of options I can’t wait to explore.

Do you look back particularly fondly on any memories from childhood?
When I was in elementary school, my parents took me to a Cirque du Soleil show at the Santa Monica Pier. I was young enough that I don’t remember which production it was. What I do remember very clearly is pointing to one of the aerialists as they spun through the glittering void like some mythical creature and saying to my parents, “I’m going to learn how to do that someday.”  It took me about twenty years, but I can happily say that I finally kept that promise to my child self.

Contact Info:

• Website: www.kaleidoscopecreature.com
• Email: [email protected]
• Instagram: instagram.com/mslexifer

Image Credit:
Andrew Lloyd, Robin Russell, Alloy Images

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