Trans Media: Tangerine

Mya Taylor was born and raised in Houston, Texas. She started her music training at age 8 and quickly became the choir lead at Terry High School, Houston, TX.  Her music inspirations are Aaliyah, Toni Braxton, and Tamar Braxton.  As a singer, she has performed in clubs in Los Angeles and Burbank. Her first film credit was the short “Hollywood Wasteland” (2010) by Bissonica Entertainment. For Tangerine, her first feature film, she won a Gotham Award for Breakthrough Actor, the San Francisco Film Critics Circle Award for Best Supporting Actress and the Independent Spirit Award for Best Supporting Female. More recently, she has appeared in the short films “Diane from the Moon” (2016) and “Happy Birthday, Marsha!” (2016).

Patrice Petro is a Professor of Film and Media Studies and Dick Wolf Director of the Carsey-Wolf Center and Presidential Chair in Media Studies. She is the author, editor, and co-editor of eleven books, such as After Capitalism: Horizons of Finance, Culture, and Citizenship (with Kennan Ferguson, 2016), Beyond Globalization: Making New Worlds in Media, Art, and Social Practices (with A. Aneesh and Lane Hall, 2011), Aftershocks of the New: Feminism and Film History (2002), and Joyless Streets: Women and Melodramatic Representation in Weimar Germany (1989). Most recently, she has completed a volume entitled The Routledge Companion to Cinema and Gender (with Kristin Hole, Dijana Jelaca, and E. Ann Kaplan), which was released in 2017.