A KIRKUS INDIE FINALIST ⭐️
A must-read for fans of Between Two Kingdoms, Famesick, and The Daily Stoic, Kimberly Warner's stunning debut brings us a philosophical memoir about illness, identity, and finding steadiness in an unfixed world.
“Warner’s poetic prose and intimate descriptions of her inscape while grieving... plunge readers directly into her reality.” —Publishers Weekly, Editor’s Pick
“Genre-defying... A gripping, often literary memoir that ruminates on life’s unfixable complications.” — Starred Kirkus Review
What happens when your body becomes uncertain territory?
In Unfixed, Kimberly Warner chronicles her descent into a world shaped by chronic illness, neurological instability, family secrets, and the destabilizing realization that the foundations of identity may be far less fixed than we imagine.
As Warner investigates the hidden truths surrounding her father and family history, she simultaneously confronts an elusive illness that alters not only her physical reality but her perception of the world itself. Water becomes both metaphor and lived experience: disorientation, drift, immersion, survival.
Blending memoir, philosophy, and emotional inquiry, Unfixed explores how we continue living when certainty disappears. Warner writes with extraordinary intelligence and vulnerability about illness, grief, embodiment, forgiveness, and the difficult art of building meaning inside ambiguity.
Lyrical, searching, and deeply original, Unfixed is a profound meditation on how we build meaning, identity, and resilience in a life that refuses to stay certain.
Twenty bodies. One thread of movement. Unbound is a short dance film created by individuals living with ME/CFS and/or Long COVID, exploring the tension between constraint and expression, stillness and vitality.
Born from the personal experiences of dramatist and director Sara Nesson and founder of Unfixed Media Kimberly Warner—both artists living with chronic illness— Unbound is a collaborative dance film that reframes disability through the language of movement. The work weaves together short, self-recorded videos from participants located in their backyards, beds, chairs, and living rooms. Rather than hiding their limitations, the film leans into them—amplifying the truth of bodies that ache to move and the creative resilience that emerges when movement is redefined. The result is a visual dialogue—a passing of the dance in which one gesture flows into the next, echoing collective struggle and shared joy. With a painterly color palette and poetic editing style, Unbound invites audiences into the lived reality of ME/CFS (myalgic encephalomyeltis/chronic fatigue syndrome) and Long COVID, offering not just awareness but a reframing: illness as choreography, constraint as canvas.
Unbound features an original score by Colby Savary and Oscar-nominated composer Mark Orton. The sensitive composition deepens the emotional landscape of the film.
founder, director, producer, author
Unfixed Media is a storytelling platform exploring what it means to be human when the boundaries we rely upon—health, identity, certainty, even selfhood—begin to shift.
Our culture loves a good fixer-upper story. We celebrate solutions, transformations, and tidy resolutions. But many of life's most profound experiences refuse to follow that arc. Illness. Grief. Disability. Aging. Mystery. Loss. The questions that remain unanswered.
Unfixed offers a different model. One that honors the courage required to live well inside uncertainty. To be unfixed is not to be broken. It is to remain in relationship with a life that cannot be fully controlled or resolved. It is to discover meaning not beyond limitation, but within it. Not after uncertainty, but through it.
Through memoir, film, essays, interviews, and community, Unfixed shares stories of people learning to inhabit life's unanswered questions with creativity, curiosity, and grace. Because sometimes life's greatest transformations arrive not through conquering or curing, but through surrender.
Our growing portfolio includes:
Two short films: Unsung and Unbound
Four limited series: Unfixed Mind, Unfixed Docuseries, Life Rebalanced Chronicles, and Long Haul Voices
A short-form vignette series: Why We Matter
Three podcasts: Unfixed Podcast, ICU, and Unfixed Interviews
A roundtable webcast: MS Confidential
Two memoirs: Liberation of Being by Dylan Shanahan, and Unfixed founder Kimberly Warner’s memoir Unfixed: A Memoir of Family, Mystery, and the Currents That Carry You Home (Empress Editions, October 2025)
An upcoming feature documentary: Unfixed: What Time Makes of Us which revisits several original participants years later to explore how time reshapes our relationship to illness, self, and meaning.
The videos you see here are a collection from the Unfixed docu-series.
*Most Innovative Storytelling Award, Winner Our Pride Shorts Fest
Unsung: Queer Portraits of Authenticity and the Cost of Its Absence is a meditative short film amplifying the voices of four LGBTQ+ individuals as they reflect on what it means to live truthfully in the face of silence, shame, and inherited erasure.
Set within the quiet intimacy of a shared domestic space, Unsung unfolds through layered conversations, gestures, and quiet candor — an intergenerational chorus of memory and becoming. As its subjects navigate queerness, identity, ancestry, and healing, the film offers a tender portrait of authenticity in process. It invites viewers to consider how the truths we suppress shape us — and how the ones we express might set us free. By centering quiet, intentional presence over narrative climax, Unsung becomes a slow, luminous act of resistance: an ode to chosen family, radical honesty, and the stories we carry forward when we’re finally seen.
The cast:
Gail Marlene Schwartz— Writer / Performer Gail is a dual citizen, relationship artist, and author of several books, including Falling Through the Night and My Sister’s Girlfriend.
Antmen Pimentel Mendoza — Poet / Cultural Worker antmen is the Director of the Multicultural Community Center at UC Berkeley and author of the chapbook My Boyfriend Apocalypse.
Aris Hearth — Healer / Writer A lover of Appalachia and writer of the Substack newsletter "A Perspective of Leaves," Aris practices divination to make sense of a constantly-changing world.
Dalia Kinsey — Registered Dietician / Public Speaker Dalia is a non-binary, pansexual, Black Registered Dietitian, speaker, podcaster, and writer, known for their book Decolonizing Wellness: A QTBIPOC-Centered Guide to Escape the Diet Trap, Heal Your Self-Image, and Achieve Body Liberation.
From the co-directors: Kimberly Warner & Troy Ford: Unsung was born from a deep longing to create space — space for stillness, for softness, for the kinds of truths that rarely fit into neat narrative arcs. We wanted to make a film that could hold the weight of silence and the quiet power of being seen. As co-directors, we arrived at this project from different but deeply connected places. Troy’s experience as a gay man — and as founder of QStack, a platform amplifying LGBTQ+ authors — gave this film its spine: a commitment to voice, visibility, and community-based storytelling. His lens is one that sees queerness not as a singular identity but as a multiplicity, as chorus. For me, the journey into Unsung was shaped by a long-held sensitivity to how the circumstances of our lives — family, culture, trauma, care — live in the body. I was interested in how authenticity is not just an idea but a physical state. Many of the participants in this film live with chronic illness or mental health conditions that, like their queerness, resist fixing. They are, like all of us, a process. And we wanted the form of the film to reflect that: unfixed, unfolding, alive. Together, we envisioned a film that moves with care, with breath, and with reverence for what can happen when queer and trans people are invited to speak — not in defense or performance, but in truth.
Unsung is a meditation, a ritual, a portrait of what it means to risk being known. What we suppress harms us. What we express sets us free. This film is an offering toward that freedom.
Edited by: Michael Wolcott with Sanctum Films
This year (2023) Unfixed Media and Health Story Collaborative, are creating a four-part, limited series, The Unfixed Mind: Navigating Mental Health Today, chronicling the real-life stories of six people living with mental health conditions. The mini-series aims to provide these individuals an opportunity to authentically share their experiences and capture the humanity and genuine complexity of navigating mental illness in today’s world. How are their lives affected beyond just symptom management? What have they learned that they can teach all of us? How are their experiences the same and different across a spectrum of mental health diagnoses and compared to individuals living with other chronic health conditions? Ultimately, the project aims to increase awareness and tolerance and decrease stigma among audience members. The stories shared will be relevant to all of us, as we will all face mental health challenges in our lifetimes, to varying degrees, directly and indirectly, but with certainty.
The Patient chronicles is a one-hour documentary that explores lives of cancer patients of various geographic, cultural, and socio-economic backgrounds offering an up-close and intimate glimpse into their day-to-day lives as they work through their cancer diagnosis and its impact. Through the experiences of patients themselves, the documentary dives into what the patient knows is conducive to healing and how to thrive at living with cancer. Directed by Jon Garcia with Dark Star Pictures.
editor
Now available on Prime Video
Long Haul Voices: Living with Long Covid and ME/CFS
Long Haul Voices is a mini-series created in partnership with Solve ME that amplifies the experiences of individuals with Long Covid and ME/CFS, the experts devoted to improving their care, and the challenges surrounding these largely invisible, poorly-understood diseases that affect a rapidly growing population.
Director, Co-producer
FaceFluf is the love child between Kimberly Warner and Calendula Flowers. After discovering the healing power of this common and easy-to-grow flower, she began making small-batch face creams, serums and oils for friends and family. Little did she know, they wouldn’t let her stop. And the rest is history.
Calendula offers a myriad of healing benefits for the skin. Renowned for its natural anti-inflammatory and antiseptic properties, FaceFluf is high in flavonoid and antioxidant content and helps promote tissue regeneration and hydration. Its gentle and calming effects make it a reliable go-to for promoting overall skin health and radiance.
Face Fluf's simple, three-product system ensures that all your skincare needs are met without complicated ingredients and fuss. Only fluffing happens here. ;)
Each small batch of product is handmade with the most potent, natural and sustainably harvested ingredients. I keep production small so I can feel confident about the exceptional quality of each batch and my evergreen promise to deliver skincare that nurtures both you and the planet.
To purchase visit my store.
MS Confidential is a monthly webcast series of candid conversations on navigating the chaos of MS.
Life with multiple sclerosis is complicated—not just in the ways one typically thinks of—unsteadiness, difficulty walking, the countless doctor’s appointments and MRI’s. Many of these symptoms are visibly apparent and often only discussed by “experts.” But there are other far less visible effects that MS can hijack. The way we relate to not only our caregivers, family, and friends can be complicated when we don’t know what the future holds for our brains and bodies. It can be terrifying, burdensome, and can be humiliating in the way we are treated by society and even by people close to us. If we are lucky, we can find humorous moments as we try to adjust to the multiple changes MS brings, and perhaps discover experiences of joy and happiness on our individual journeys.
MS Confidential is a webcast that provides a safe space for personal and informal discussions for people living with multiple sclerosis. Three panelists living with various stages of MS —Elizabeth Jameson, Annie Brewster, and Kyle Kranich, are joined by a dynamic guest each month, disclosing some of their innermost frustrations and challenges, engage in open conversations with one another, and provide opportunities for viewers to participate as well.
Visit the Unfixed website to learn more.
co-producer
Welcome to the Unfixed Podcast.
Unfixed is a podcast about living—and learning to love—the question. In each season, we explore the unpredictable terrain of adversity, creativity, and transformation through intimate, unguarded conversations with people who are reshaping their lives in the wake of what they didn’t choose.
Season One opened a bridge, inviting listeners into the lived experience of chronic illness and disability, not as something to fix or fear, but as a human reality we all understand in some form. We asked people to engage with an open heart, to sit inside another’s story without needing to solve it, to recognize that purpose and meaning don’t depend on resolution.
Season Two expanded that listening into a literary landscape. Conversations with writers whose work holds the beautiful, bewildering complexity of being alive. Illness, yes, but also midlife reinvention, family rupture, climate grief, creative becoming. We learned that the unfixed condition lives everywhere: in our bodies, our relationships, our work, our sense of home, our future on this planet.
Season Three is about the LIVE moment, the truth before the tidy arc. Just two people asking, together: What if the thing you thought was breaking you is the thing that is building you into someone more whole? What if broken IS the fix?
Listen on Apple Podcasts, Spotify or Youtube
producer
9 incredible vestibular warriors share their stories in a new docuseries for Vestibular Disorders Association (VeDA.)
Life Rebalanced Chronicles features six episodes, which will be aired weekly starting August 17th, 2021, in conjunction with Balance Awareness Week. Each episode is focused on a part of the human experience impacted by living with vestibular dysfunction, such as: Mind, Body, Spirit, Relationships, Self, Life...Rebalanced.
To learn more visit the Unfixed website and VeDA’s website.
director, editor
In Liberation of Being: Allowing Terminal Illness to Teach Us How to Live, Dr. Dylan Shanahan invites readers into a journey of profound resilience and philosophical exploration. Diagnosed with ALS in the prime of his life, Dylan confronts the relentless progression of the disease with courage and introspection. Formerly a vibrant athlete and dedicated scholar, Dylan's life takes an unexpected turn as he adapts to a body that steadily betrays him.
Through the pages of this poignant memoir, Dylan shares his evolution from physical prowess to profound physical limitation, navigating the loss of motor function with grace and wisdom. Drawing on his background in naturopathic medicine and Aikido, he explores themes of acceptance, autonomy, and the intrinsic worth of every human life. His use of eye-tracking technology becomes not just a tool for communication but a lifeline to express his deepest thoughts on life, suffering, and the quest for meaning.
As Dylan's physical abilities diminish, his spiritual and intellectual journey unfolds with remarkable clarity. He challenges readers to reconsider their own relationship with control and mortality, offering a compelling argument for embracing life's uncertainties with equanimity. Dylan's decision to assert agency over his final moments, ensuring a dignified exit on his terms, underscores his unwavering commitment to autonomy and self-determination.
Liberation of Beingis more than a memoir; it is a profound meditation on the beauty and fragility of life itself. Dylan Shanahan's legacy is a testament to the power of resilience, the importance of finding purpose beyond physical capability, and the enduring value of every individual's existence. This book is a must-read for anyone grappling with existential questions, seeking inspiration in the face of adversity, or simply searching for a deeper understanding of what it means to truly live.
It was the privilege of a lifetime to act as literary executor and chief producer to help to Dylan bring this life-changing memoir into the world.
We are conditioned to believe that perfect health, status, and successful careers are the key to happiness. But despite our perfection-performance oriented culture, many find themselves living lives of chronic illness, pain and disability that challenge this paradigm.
In the media, we celebrate stories of heroes who have persevered despite the odds and triumphed over hardship but the reality is often less storybook. There isn’t always a cure for what ails us.
Yet within this tension, the human spirit often not only prevails but thrives. When faced with the predicament of no apparent answer, no fix, many people with chronic conditions eventually find adaptation, connection, resilience and purpose despite our lives lacking what society told us would bring happiness.
Too often these stories are shared and valued only within the disability communities. But these lives have unique contributions to all of society as they creatively contend with the pervasive experiences of pain, uncertainty, disappointment and isolation.
Why We Matter is a vignette series that explores how and why the voices of the unfixed have been overlooked in our society, how they are shaped by the friction of constant adversity and why this world is a better place because their stories, struggles and triumphs are a part of it.
View all the vignettes here: https://unfixedmedia.com/whywematter
Standing on the threshold between innocence and experience, a young ballerina glimpses a hidden truth about her future as she teeters between light and dark, order and chaos. 9 is a coming of age tale about the mysterious and sometimes frightening initiations that usher us into our becoming.
writer, directer, producer
BEST OREGON SHORT FILM - Portland International Film Festival, Portland, OR - February 2014
OFFICIAL SELECTION - Portland Oregon Women's Film Festival, Portland, OR - March 2014
OFFICIAL SELECTION - Dances With Films, Hollywood, CA - June 2014
OFFICIAL SELECTION - Salento International Film Festival, Salento, Italy - June 2014
OFFICIAL SELECTION - NW Film Forum - Local Sightings Festival, Seattle, WA - October 2014
OFFICIAL SELECTION - San Fransisco Dance Film Festival, San Francisco, CA - November 2014
OFFICIAL SELECTION - Working Art Space and Production Festival, Romania - March 2015
OFFICIAL SELECTION - Cabriolet Film Festival, Beirut, Lebanon - May 2015
While watching lifeguards perform rescue drills at a neighborhood pool, a woman faces her own need to be saved.
writer, director, editor, production designer
OFFICIAL SELECTION at POW Festival, Portland, OR - March 2012
OFFICIAL SELECTION at Aesthetica Short Film Festival, York, United Kingdom - November 2012
OFFICIAL SELECTION at Brisbane International Film Festival, Brisbane, Australia - November 2012
OFFICIAL SELECTION at NW Filmmakers Film Festival, Portland, OR - November 2012
OFFICIAL SELECTION at Light Assembly Film Festival, Miami, Florida- December 2012
OFFICIAL SELECTION at Portland International Film Festival, Portland, OR - February 2013
OFFICIAL SELECTION at iShorts, Prague, Czech Republic - June 2013
OFFICIAL SELECTION Women's Independent Film Festival, Santa Monica, CA - December 2013
director, videographer, editor
Music Changes Everything is a limited series that documents the lives, adventures and performances of underserved children involved in an intensive classical musical education program in Portland, OR.
writer, photographer, videographer
This little book is a visionary compass generated for Microsoft and the billions of lives touched by their work. My partner (David McLaughlin) and I were summoned to brainstorm, think big, write poetry and imagineer a manifesto that would inspire the internal creative teams to view themselves as humanists first, technologists second.
Here is what now lives in the back pockets of the designers and engineers at Microsoft. Word has it that even the CEO Satya Nadella has a copy on his desk.
All copy, imagery and video generated by myself and David McLaughlin.
I have Mal de Debarquement Syndrome (MdDS).
MdDS is a rare, neurological disorder that manifests as constant dizziness or perception of rocking, bobbing or swaying. MdDS is a different kind of spatial disorientation than vertigo. It’s not vestibular, it’s neurological. The dizziness that I live with feels more like the ground is constantly moving under my feet. Laying down or closing my eyes does not make it stop. Whatever surface I’m on turns to liquid and my equilibrium is constantly trying to correct for it. Ironically, being in passive motion is the only source of relief. Driving in a car is bliss to many suffering from MdDS…until we reach a stop sign.
I don’t remember the exact moment I discovered needle felting, but it changed my life. It’s a fiber art of the most rudimentary, free-form kind. By repetitively piercing wool fibers with a sharp, barbed needle it compresses the loose fibers into a solid mass…sculpting with wool. Perhaps it was the repetition of the needlework, or the quiet, muffled qualities of the wool, but I found I could lose myself in it. For hours on end. The ground didn’t stop moving, but focusing on the object in my hands helped drown it out. Needle felting became my medicine.
What emerged at the other end of thousands of hours of shaping wool with a needle was 13 hairless cats. This was not the plan. It just happened. Somewhere along the journey I realized I was telling my story, not with words on paper, but with wool and cats, each sculpture a chapter in my wobbly journey. There are aspects I can quantify. Others I can’t. I don’t know why one is turquoise, another one yellow. I don’t know how the scale came about. What I do know is that after living on a sea of constant motion, these felines became a life raft for me. Not just the act of creating them but also what they came to represent. I know that I may never reach shore. But the raft and my companions have helped me not just survive, but thrive during the most merciless of storms.
Purchase Life Raft - a visual story of her needle-felting lifeline and the insights is nurtured.
When film director Kimberly Warner developed a debilitating neurological disorder mid-life she was forced to trade big screens for balls of wool and digital frames for three-dimensional, analog comfort. Until she was able to adapt and return to her work as a filmmaker, the quiet passing of a needle through wool helped her connect with the simple and profound joy of creating.
Needle felting became a lifeline and the thirteen hairless cat sculptures she created over a period of two years became a microphone for the struggles and insights her conscious mind couldn’t yet articulate. The sculptures speak personally but also collectively to anyone who suffers disability and chronic illness - communicating our longing to be normal, the challenges of being part of a world that doesn’t understand and the need to find a form of self-expression and purpose even when our body makes it nearly impossible.
Each figure took hundreds of hours to sculpt but the satisfaction of creating during the immense chapter of uncertainty brought shape and meaning to her days. This hairless cat series - with their exposed bones and curves - intimately expresses the vulnerability and raw, fragile aliveness that is the truth of who we all are, especially when "our protective furs" have fallen away.
This book offers a very personal and honest look at what it’s like to live with a rare or chronic disorder and how disheartening it can be to chase cures. It is the author/artist’s hope that it might be a companion to those who are searching for a new, empowering perspective on living with adversity.
Welcome to the ICU podcast, where we explore the vestibular experience through conversations between patients and the health professionals who care for them.
Vestibular disorders are challenging to identify, diagnose, treat, and of course (if you’re a patient), live with. A large part of this challenge stems from the invisible nature of the disorder as well as limited medical training. This podcast is a rare opportunity for vestibular patients to intimately share their stories and provide important insight to healthcare providers. In turn, medical professionals get to ask patients questions, refine their understanding of balance disorders and equip themselves to better care for, treat and truly “see” the invisible challenges of vestibular patients.
Listen on Apple Podcasts
Listen on Spotify
Listen and watch on Youtube
director, videographer, editor
For twelve months, I worked closely with Portland Edible Gardens to film and edit a series of educational videos to help the eager and hungry gardener get a leg up on their own backyard veggie market.
snaps from living and loving rural
Currently I’m not doing any more commissioned sculptures but I may pick it up again in the future. If you’d like to reach out, please email:
warnerkimberly@me.com
