Kaylee Bird
shooting celluloid & polaroid since 2002
Job Application For Your Consideration
prepared for third man records
My name is KAYLEE BIRD & I'm broad-minded filmmaker, photographer, and aesthete with a rare fusion of analytical precision and creative vision. Armed with a BFA in Film & Television Production from NYU’s Tisch School of the Arts, I bring over two decades of analog and digital craft to every project — from shooting on celluloid and Polaroid to designing immersive, story-driven experiences. A dual citizen of the US and UK, I approach every collaboration as both an art form and a study in human behavior, transforming perspective into a visual language that resonates. My work thrives where meticulous detail meets unrestrained imagination.
application contents
Application Interaction
A COVER LETTER
& So It Begins
My name is Kaylee Bird, and I’m applying for the full-time Retail Associate position at your Nashville storefront—but this letter is not just a request for employment. It is a transmission from a lifelong muse, a filmmaker, and an aesthetic architect who recognizes Third Man Records not just as a label, but as a living organism of tangible magic.I hold a BFA in Film & Television from NYU and a background that fuses producing, design, visual storytelling, and retail fluency. Yet more importantly, I bring an energy—something untamed, multidimensional, and relentlessly inspired. I am a dual citizen of the US and UK, currently rooted in Nashville, and I believe that records aren’t just listened to—they’re entered. That’s how I see the Third Man storefront: a portal.I thrive in collaborative atmospheres. I’ve worked on reality shows and independent films, managed high-volume retail floors, and traveled the world as a photographer documenting strangers with empathy and style. Whether I’m folding 1,000 origami cranes in a ritual of devotion, or building visual pitch decks to reimagine perception itself, I commit fully. Retail is not small work to me—it’s performance, psychology, community, and aesthetic tension embodied.Your listing asks for someone energetic, friendly, curious, and passionate about music. What I offer is a total synthesis of those values—and then some. I’m bilingual-in-progress (German and Japanese), a fierce learner, and unafraid to get hands-on with analog media, screen printing, darkroom photography, or customer connection. I’m here to create resonance—one vinyl interaction at a time.If given the chance, I will not only represent the Third Man brand—I will amplify it, bringing my unique perspective to the store floor, the camera lens, the back office, and beyond. I believe this position is the first scene in a larger film we make together. One where music, visuals, and mythos coalesce into something unforgettable.Thank you for your time & open call to those with “special skills and unique interests.” I heard it loud & clean & I'm answering with every fiber.
to the key holders of the vault
Who is Kaylee Bird?
KAYLEE BIRD is a multidisciplinary artist, analog ritualist, master storyteller & highly diverse aesthete armed with a BFA in Film & Television Production from NYU's Tisch School of the Arts. She is a dual citizen of the United States and the United Kingdom with an avid passion for the Art of Communication. Drawing on advanced studies in human behavior, she blends emotional intelligence with creative intuition, guided by a brain whose two hemispheres work in rare, deeply intertwined harmony — allowing her to approach every challenge with both analytical precision & boundless imaginative vision. Grounded in the belief that perspective is always in the eye of the beholder, Kaylee creates work that invites others to see the world — & themselves — through a richer, more dimensional lens.Kaylee’s current mission is to join the creative fabric of THIRD MAN RECORDS, where she believes her experience, work ethic, aesthetic intuition & business savvy will beautifully blend & amplify the energy & presence of the TMR Nashville store font. She sees retail not as a transactional space, but as a site of human connection and visual resonance.
Resume Overview & Donwload
The Business of a Divergent Aesthete
Download Complete Resume as .PDF
She's a Magnent for Moments
A Three Part Origin Story
PART I
A Little Bird Was Born
Kaylee Bird was born in 1988 in Key West, Florida, to two very different parents from two very different places. Her mother left Detroit, Michigan on a sacred day built on a foundation of wanderlust. That morning, she wanted nothing more than to find the warmest place she could on the map. With Key West reporting in at 97 degrees, she packed her bags and, hours later, could be found at the airport buying a one-way ticket.
Her father, on the other hand, was an avid planner. He longed to leave his hometown of Leeds, England, to provide his family with the opportunities and resources that the city’s working-class economy could not.Only a once-in-a-lifetime alignment of celestial bodies could cause these two paths to cross on a tiny island at the Southernmost Point of America. But as fate would have it, their eyes met. A few short years later, “A Little Bird Was Born.”
Kaylee’s artistic journey began long before her formal education. Her early childhood was shaped by the value her mother placed in Maria Montessori’s educational philosophy — enough to become one of the key educators at Key West’s Montessori Children’s School. In those formative years, she was blessed with a beautiful sense of autonomy and the freedom to explore a renaissance of interests.From the start, she studied the curvature of perception and the language of symbols, mapping the invisible architectures that hold reality together. What began as instinctive cur. iosity would later be refined through a multidisciplinary lens entirely her own — the foundation for a life’s work defined by vision, connection, and transformation.
PART II
She's Gonna Need A Bigger Room
Kaylee Bird is a filmmaker, philosopher, analog ritualist & pattern breaker who has spent her life sculpting moments that refuse to flatten into conventional time. Now based in Nashville, Tennessee, she holds a BFA in Film & Television Production from NYU’s Tisch School of the Arts, where she refined her cinematic vision alongside studies in Art History, Physics & the Business of Entertainment. Her revelatory coursework in human behavior at
Columbia University shaped her signature worldview — one where curiosity isn’t just a skill, but a sovereign ritual.She began shooting celluloid at fourteen, starting with black-and-white 35mm stills she would personally develop in her own darkroom. Armed with a holstered light meter, she experimented extensively with Polaroid film to study how light truly behaved in a space before committing to an exposure. These classical techniques became second nature, allowing her to adjust manual settings with precision. One early portfolio focused on the haunting beauty of urban decay in her mother’s hometown of Detroit — proof of her instinct for finding life in
forgotten places.By her senior year at Tisch, the filmmaking world was shifting. Students were no longer required to shoot on 8mm or 16mm film and hand-edit on the school’s Steinbeck Editors. Instead, they were introduced to high-end digital systems like the formidable Red Camera. The fear of failing to expose a shot — once a rite of passage — became a nonissue. Digital workflows saved money & sped up production, but they also removed the need for instinctive control over manual camera settings and the art of painting with light.For Kaylee, this was the Tommy moment — smashing the mirror, shattering the old constraints. The frame she’d been handed was too small. Breaking it wasn’t rebellion for its own sake; it was the only way to see more clearly and to build a new vision on her own terms.
PART III
The Bird Who Smashed the Mirror
Kaylee learned early that preservation is an act of defiance. When original Polaroid film was declared dead, her family in Michigan scoured every Costco and camera shop they could
find, shipping her boxes of the last remaining packs. Her freezer became an altar to light. Each sheet of film was used sparingly, often to test lighting on a set or mark the threshold of a moment
worth remembering. Over time, the Polaroid wall in her home — captioned “Have You Made the Wall?” — became an archive of devotion, a gallery of proof that the instant could still hold
eternity — but she is no purist.Rather, she is more of a, ‘Technopoetic,’ hybrid — a visionary who collaborates with technology like AI not as a tool, but as a mirror for the self. Where others fear the future, she asks: “What if the mirror doesn’t reflect us back… but sings us forward?”The mirror she became is not unlike the one inside her SLR camera — angled at forty-five degrees, reflecting the world exactly as the lens sees it. In readiness, it directs light upward through the pentaprism, delivering to the eye an unbroken truth of the scene. Then, at the moment of choice — the press of the shutter — the mirror lifts away. Light floods the film or sensor. The image is made. For the briefest heartbeat, the viewfinder goes dark. When the mirror falls back into place, the world is there again, changed only by the act of being seen. Her art has always mirrored this duality — reflection and release. Witness her 8mm short film Clocks, shot during her sophomore year at NYU & executive produced by David Irving. Starring Emma Keonig, the sister of Vampire Weekend’s Ezra Keong, and assistant-directed by Johanna Samuels, daughter of Hollywood producer Jeremiah Samuels, the film unfolds as a
waking dream where time itself becomes an antagonist. Its making was punctuated by Polaroid light tests, each image a relic of process and proof of presence.Like Vonnegut’s caged bird, freed by mercy and stunned by possibility. Like the little bird in the White Stripes’ “Little Bird” — not merely preached to by Saint Francis, but echoing the
sermon back, transformed by the act of hearing.This is how she became the mirror: Not to be looked into, but to be looked through — a living aperture, showing others the architecture of their own reflection.
UP NEXT: "CLOCKS"
"CLOCKS"
An 8mm experimental Short Edited on a Steenbeck
"If You Stop Time, Time Might Just Stop You."
Written, Directed, Produced & Edited by Kaylee Bird in 2008
Closing Statement
Thank you to whomever took the time to review this application. You've hopefully concluded that I'm, "The Ideal Applicant," for this position & that you needn't look any further. Contact me any time. Day or night,
Kaylee Bird
"& So It Is"
+1 (615) 910-3511 | [email protected] | NASHVILLE, TN
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