Kiela Pagsisihan

I was born in Makati City in the Philippines on April 29, 1994. We moved to New York for a few years before we moved down to Georgia. We go back home to the Philippines every other summer.

I'm the oldest in a family of 3. I love art, cooking, French, and music. I play piano, guitar, and ukulele. My favorite TV shows are Supernatural and American Horror Story. I love musicians like Florence and the Machine, The XX, and Local Natives. I loved the movies Donnie Darko and The Breakfast Club. I really admire Anselm Kiefer and Alex Pardee. I also have the strangest affinity for period movies and steampunk.

I don't have a lot of faith in humanity, or anything, really. I'm very quiet and I have a tendency to get lost in my thoughts. I come across as blunt and insensitive more often than not, but it's never intentional. I'm just unbelievably introverted and emotionally detached.

My portfolio is all about perspective, and how my own is constantly changing - sometimes rather forcefully.

When my oldest cousin died, he was 16 and I was 12. His death made me look at my life and my choices and rearrange my priorities. Another cousin of mine seems to be living his life as a tribute to our dead cousin. I miss the person he used to be, and I hate that he made this decision. I don't think our dead cousin would want this. I think he would want us to live our lives to the fullest, and in the manner which we desire, because that's exactly what he did when he was alive. I'm determined to do the same.

When I visited Europe for the first time, I was 16, and I can honestly say the experience was life changing. I thought that I would enjoy visiting England and France the most. When we arrived, England and France were nothing like I had imagined them to be in my mind. The country that I enjoyed the most was Switzerland. The mountains, the scenery, the clean water and the even cleaner air was exhilarating and rejeuvenating, and I'm definitely going back someday.

I feel like my life is a map and I've only been living in a certain portion of it. However, it's slowly broadening, my education illuminating regions of the map that I hadn't discovered. The light's covered a lot of the map now, but that just means I have to look at the map in a different way. Flip it upside down. Hold it at a different angle.

Just because the map's illuminated doesn't mean that I've seen all that there is to see.