PORTFOLIO
DIGITAL MEDIA & INTERACTIVE PERFORMANCE
Anna Miles is multidisciplinary creator whose work hovers in the liminal space between horror and fantasy and between the whimsical and the uncanny, weaving sensorily rich worlds where girlhood and womanhood are reclaimed and reimagined. With a background in site-specific live theater and digital interactive experiences, Anna’s diverse creations draw from mythology, fairy tales, and folklore to craft allegorical experiences that challenge conventional narrative structures. She is particularly interested in bringing storytelling into unexpected spaces and exploring the role of digital platforms and community spaces in communal storytelling. With a deep commitment to social justice, feminist thought, and aesthetic innovation, her work aims to engage the collective subconscious to spark radical reinterpretations of the world.
ONLINE ARGs/SOCIAL MEDIA STORYTELLING
2020-2023
Zenith encompasses a years-long transmedia project and ARG: documenting the bizarre downfall and rebirth of original influence character Cassandra Clemm, Zenith explored questions of performative vulnerability, the commodification of mental illness, toxic wellness and beauty culture, and high control communities. The project, running from 2020-2023, included an interactive Instagram performance art experience, an extended digital ARG, bonus materials included a guided meditation and personalized "Casseos," and two short films, Cassandra Q+A and Zenith. The one minute version of Zenith was chosen as an official selection for NYX Horror's 2021 "13 Minutes of Horror Film Festival" and as category winner in the 2022 Wench Film Festival and was streamed on Shudder. The four-minute version is currently distributed by Red Tower Entertainment. An extension of the project was chosen as a finalist for the Drama League's 2023 Beatrice Terry Residency.
The project was a collaboration and co-creation between Anna Miles, Chloe Cole, and Sabina Friedman-Seitz. All visual images, including photos and film, were directed, curated, and edited by Anna Miles. Web design and ongoing management of the online ARG by Anna Miles. #NeverAlone was written by Chloe Cole, and all other installments including The Cleanse, Zenith, Cassandra Q+A, and others were co-written by Anna Miles, Chloe Cole, and Sabina Friedman-Seitz. Sabina Friedman-Seitz plays Cassandra Clemm. Video footage and photos by Scott Ray.
Read about #NeverAlone in the AV Club
Enter Zenith to experience the full project: www.zenithwellnessretreat.com
Learn more about Cassandra Herself
Follow Cassandra on Instagram: @cassandra_clemm
Something is wrong with Cassandra Clemm, an influencer who has built her brand by peddling vulnerable and raw reflections on her mental wellness journey.
Her pathological need to perform her “self” has grown so strong that she no longer can control it -- and it begins to control her. Will any of her devoted fans recognize what is happening and help her before it’s too late? Or will they celebrate her honest depiction of her mental deterioration? Or will they turn on her once she can no longer supply them with the same hollow daily affirmations they’ve become reliant on?
#NeverAlone is an interactive instagram installation that investigates the dangers of performative vulnerability, the strained relationship between influencers and their followers, and the complexities of the manifestations of mental illness. The project rewards those who pay close attention as there are clues and Easter eggs hidden throughout her Instagram page.
Zenith: The One Minute Version
Zenith: The Four Minute Version
The Cleanse
above all
don't disappear
2025 (Ongoing)
Home Sweet Holleigh is a darkly satirical hybrid project blending digital performance and live storytelling, chronicling a year in the life of “Holleigh Locklyn,” a picture-perfect Christian mommy blogger and tradwife influencer. and Bethany, an isolated, devout housewife who becomes disturbingly obsessed with her. But when Bethany discovers Holleigh is not a woman at all, but a corporate fabrication by the Christian craft store empire (and Bible museum funders) Hobby Lobby to market products and peddle conservative Christian ideals, her disillusionment triggers a spiral into religious psychosis. Convinced Holleigh is a false prophet, Bethany takes over the blog and embarks on a deranged crusade to expose the truth and crown herself the true spiritual leader fit to spread the gospel of David Greene. A biting exploration of online radicalization, manufactured and weaponized femininity, the “choice feminism” fallacy, corporate control, the romanticization of marriage, submission, and motherhood, and the seductive performance of online identities, Home Sweet Holleigh exposes the blurred line between belief, branding, and breakdown in a culture increasingly defined by loneliness, curated perfection, and faith in the algorithm. Currently at the beginning of "Phase 1: Holleigh's Blog."
Created in collaboration with Amanda Godoy; co-written by Anna Miles and Amanda Godoy, directed by Anna Miles, visual content creation, photography, video, editing, and web design by Anna Miles.
Follow the Blog:
Follow Holleigh on Instagram and TikTok: @cassandra_clemm
SELECT LIVE EVENTS AND PERFORMANCE PROJECTS
2024
Our Feet Off the Ground was a touring outdoor movement piece using the medium of dance as a vehicle for reckoning with the perils and passions of inhabiting a female body. Developed collaboratively by an ensemble of performers and choreographer Emily-Mae Kamp under the direction of Anna Miles, this immersive live experience darkly reimagined Hans Christian Andersen's stories, intersecting their language and themes with movement that spoke with urgency and vulnerability. Infusing classic fairy tales with contemporary female voices, the project told a new, subverted fairy tale about bodies, through the body, celebrating its strength, its softness, and its resistance. Drawing on the symbolism of forests and wilderness, the performance invited audiences into a raw, physical world where desire (simultaneously frightening and enticing) stretched wide and threatened to become all consuming. The piece delved into what it means to want, to risk, and to survive within a culture that often tries to tame or silence female desire. Our Feet Off the Ground twisted and subverted familiar stories into something new and uncanny, encouraging audiences to challenge accepted cultural narratives: a reckoning and a release.
created, written, and directed by Anna Miles; choreographed by Emily-Mae Kamp; produced by Beating of Wings Collective in partnership with Debatable Productions
production photos by Anna Miles, promo photos by Andrea Decker
2013
It Was the Nightingale: Persephone's Play was the creative culmination of my independent research exploring Greek theater, mythology, contemporary Greek adaptations, and archetypal mythological patterns as they appeared in pop culture with a focus on how these narratives shape cultural understandings of girlhood and the complexities of female adolescence. This play was the synethisis of this research and was produced as my Honors Thesis at Northwestern University under the mentorship of faculty advisor David Catlin. This feminist retelling of the Hades and Persephone myth, which blended original text with a pastiche of found text and movement, reframed a tale of abduction and sorrow into a powerful story of female agency and adolescent sexual awakening. The play was staged as an immersive, site-specific experience in an abandoned observatory atop a seminary school, blending myth, performance, and environment to challenge traditional narratives and invite audiences to experience modern myth in a tactile, embodied, and visceral way.
researched, written, and directed by Anna Miles; promo and production photos by Alaura Hernandez
2018
Do you ever wish you could hold your teenage self in the palm of your hand, and talk to her just one more time?
In 2004, both navigating the troubled waters of public schools in forgotten corners of Northern California, the teenaged Anna Miles and Melissa Dunham both embarked on journeys of adolescent self-discovery, using the only tools consistently at their disposal- a series of college-ruled notebooks and some colored pens. Adapted from their real, actual, genuine high school and junior high journals, including Anna's Harry Potter fanfiction and Melissa's lovesick Phantom of the Opera lyrical analysis, this live experience told a story of first love, intense obsession, and ultimate heartbreak as two teenage girls use fiction and fantasy to experiment with sexuality, identity, and the complications of growing up.
written, directed, and co-starring Anna Miles; photos by Chauna Goldberg
2019
Phoenix Songs and Divine: Songs for a New Moon were storytelling and music gatherings created as expressive spaces for women and nonbinary artists intended to celebrate and reclaim the timeless human practice of live storytelling. Rooted in mythological themes and shared ritual, these events invited performers and community members to connect, create, and take up space through experiential narrative and sound.
created and organized by Anna Miles; photos by Chris Meissner and Carly Bracco
Phoenix Songs explored themes of rebirth, resilience, and transformation, centering on the image of rising from the ashes. The evening culminated in a communal ritual, where attendees wrote down what they were ready to release and burned the paper in a fire pit, symbolizing collective renewal. A digital version of Phoenix Songs, "Fireplace: Phoenix Songs," offered an additional space for artists in the early days of the pandemic lockdown to express and connect.
Divine: Songs for a New Moon honored the moon’s deep ties to femininity, cycles, and the divine feminine. Through music and mythic storytelling, the event celebrated intuition and inner power, offering a nurturing space for creative expression and spiritual connection.
Both gatherings served as intentional community spaces where myth met art, and where underrepresented voices were uplifted in celebration, reflection, and transformation.
PHOTO SERIES
2020
Trudoir is a broken, fragmented self-portrait that resists polish, performance, and perfection. Shot in old white underwear, intimate, raw images reveal the body in its most honest, private, messy state...a state both vulnerable and defiant. Drawing from the tradition of boudoir photography only to subvert it, Trudoir is a modern visual blazon poem which fractures the gaze and rests uneasily in the blurred boundaries between self-objectification and self-celebration, between public performance of the body and private experience of the Self.
photos by Anna Miles
2019
She Wears Her Rage Gently is a photo series created, curated, and directed by Anna Miles, with photos taken by Chassey Bennett, for the launch of Beating of Wings: An Artist Collective in 2019. It challenges the societal tendency to diminish aesthetics and activities traditionally deemed as “feminine” by exploring and celebrating the multifaceted nature of femininity through intimate, chaotic, and ethereal imagery. This series invites reflection on how fluid femininity can be soft yet fierce, communal yet individual, grounded in tradition while simultaneously breaking norms.
The shoot was simultaneously a community event, inviting any and all women and nonbinary artists to join in the communal space.
created, curated, styled, and directed by Anna Miles; photos by Chassey Bennett
Soft lighting, vintage tones, and editorial composition lull the viewer into comfort, only to be disrupted by unruly bodies and confrontation. Traditional “feminine” garments are recontextualized as radical: lace and tulle serve not as symbols of fragility, but as armor, disguising unrest beneath elegance. Rage is wrapped in ribbons, fury hidden behind florals. Stereotypical models of sensuality are subverted into the political: intimacy is wielded as protest, softness as strategy, recasting femininity as something that isn’t sterile, but instead raw, wild, and screaming. It reimagines the performance of girlhood as something done not for others’ comfort or entertainment, but as a ritual performed for the sacred self. Femmes refuse to wait until they are given space, instead clawing at it and claiming it for themselves. The series dismantles the patriarchal myth which conflates softness with weakness and documents the slow, often invisible burn of womanhood — the way rage simmers beneath pleasantries, the ways women have been told to shrink, soothe, and smile, and how they choose, instead, to erupt.
