America’s story

America is a Hollywood stuntwoman, filmmaker, stunt coordinator, voice over actor, director, and the mom of a toddler. Though her schedule is different every day, and the overlap between work and family life can be grueling, she thrives on the chaos. "Everything is on fire, but I got it," she says.

In addition to the unpaid domestic labor in her home, America also spends unpaid hours working as Co-President & Founder of The Chimaera Project, a nonprofit that advocates for female-identifying filmmakers in an industry that notoriously under-represents women. 

The 2024 UCLA Hollywood Diversity Report shows that in the top 200 films of 2023, only about 15% of directors were women, and they worked on films with smaller budgets than men. And if we add race into the equation as well, for Latina or Hispanic women like America, we’re down to just 5 directors out of 200.¹

In the sculpture of her hours, heavy gold and black forms represent America’s paid labor hours, and less-weighty silver and black forms represent her unpaid labor hours. Spaces in the sequence represent waking hours when America was not working, either at her job, her nonprofit, or at home.

¹ socialsciences.ucla.edu