Writer & activist
Kayla Hill
Kayla Hill (she/her) is an emerging artist from Western Sydney, writing with a primary focus on climate change and climate activism when she is not at uni working on her Bachelor of Arts in Philosophy and Gender Studies.Following a bushfire, pandemic, and La Niña filled adolescence in School Strike for Climate (SS4C), Kayla is extending her activism into both fiction and non-fiction works, exploring themes of hope, despair, joy, and rage.
Strike!
Over 2023, Kayla undertook the Testing Grounds program produced by Curious Works where she developed a TV dramedy series that explores what takes place behind the scenes in youth climate activism.Strike! looks at climate activists in their various natural elements as their typical adolescent problems of friendship, school, relationships, and identity become intertwined with the existential fight for climate action.
Further development and production is planned for 2024.
Growing Pains
Kayla is working on a memoir and documentary that reflects on her four years in School Strike for Climate.As the momentum of the climate strikes slows, is the climate era over? How do we stay hopeful? What legacies have been made?
Action Not Hope
Kayla was featured in this short documentary for AFTRS directed by Zebedee Parkes about climate activism after the Black Summer, and how we can fit 'hope' within our philosophy for climate action among great despair.
A Radical Hope
Kayla was featured in an award-winning documentary directed by Zebedee Parkes for the 2022 Dare to Struggle Film Festival. It followed three SS4C Sydney organisers preparing for a strike outside Scott Morrison's house.
La Niña
Kayla's debut project is a poetry suite composed over 2021 and 2022 for her HSC English Extension 2 Major Work. Embedded in religious allusion, La Niña explores motherhood, grief, and survival amid devastating floods.
At the hour of dusk,
we too, lay exhausted,
but, perhaps nearer
to Paradise.