Hayley Kiyoko

Hayley Kiyoko was born in Los Angeles and was already filming national commercials before she turned ten.

Her father is an actor and her mother is a choreographer, and the living room of her home was her first stage. In 2009, she played Velma Dinkley in Scooby-Doo! Mystery Incorporated. That TV role gave her the visibility she needed to break into the Disney Channel machine.

It was a calculated risk.

In 2011, she appeared in Lemonade Mouth. The movie drew 5.7 million viewers on its U.S. premiere night. But Kiyoko didn't want to be just a face in a fictional band.

Total control of the image

She began writing her own songs and directing her music videos because no one understood the aesthetic she was after. The video for Girls Like Girls was released in 2015. She directed and financed it herself.

The piece has more than 160 million views on YouTube. This project changed her career path outside of conventional recording studios.

In 2015, she joined the cast of CSI: Cyber as Raven Ramirez. She worked on 31 episodes over two seasons. But her real interest was in her own visual storytelling.

The system doesn't always make it easy.

In 2018, she released her debut studio album, Expectations. Critics praised her ability to produce and direct visuals that didn't depend on massive outside budgets. That independence allowed her to avoid the labels imposed by the traditional music industry.

Behind-the-Scenes Numbers and Techniques

In May 2023, she published her first young adult novel, also titled Girls Like Girls. The book is based on the universe of the music video she directed eight years earlier. The book quickly reached the top spots on young adult fiction bestseller lists.

And her move into acting didn't slow down her music production.

During 2022, she released the album Panorama. She supervised every frame of the visuals associated with this work. Kiyoko often shoots with Arri Alexa cameras to achieve a cinematic texture in her music videos.

The production of her 2023 tour included a crew of 24 full-time members traveling across Europe and North America.