Kynan Dias is an actor and award-winning screenwriter, born in Honolulu and raised in Las Vegas. Inspired at an early age by great American playwrights such as Tennessee Williams, Arthur Miller, and Edward Albee, Kynan taught himself to write feature-length screenplays as a 14-year-old high school student. He earned a B.A. in film from the University of Nevada, Las Vegas, where he pursued acting, screenwriting, and directing. Later, Kynan earned his MFA in screenwriting from the University of California, Los Angeles, where he developed a love for writing TV sitcoms that were further nurtured during his time studying improv comedy at the Upright Citizens Brigade.
As a writer, Kynan's films tend to live within the thin space between the humorous and the tragic, in sarcastic dramas and in comedies that hurt. As an actor, he is often hired to cry in comedies. With Lester Ryan Clark, Kynan co-hosts a series of film history podcasts on the TruStory.FM network that are meticulously researched yet lean heavily on improvised comedy.
Teaching at UNLV FILM since 2008, Kynan has developed a wide variety of courses in film production, directing, acting, screenwriting, and film studies, being especially proud of building classes such as Women in Comedy and Queer Cinema. His research interests include animation history, studio system economics, queer coding in classic film, and foregrounding previously unsung collaborators within major film authors' historiographies.
🌐 IMDb • Kynan Dias
Satan narrates a panorama of human massacre. Then produces goblets of heavenly wine. Seppi says ‘we shall be there someday.’ Satan seems to be thinking of something else entirely.
Evelyn’s eyes fill with black while the score plays a hero’s reawakening—and Jobu’s expression when “nothing matters” lands isn’t triumph. It’s something much more like nausea.
The darkest chapter of the season: a death the boys can’t prevent, a mother who curses God, and Satan rewriting a stranger into hell to help her. Twain might be darker than Poe.
We thought this was about stopping a villain. It turns out it was always about a mother and a daughter who stopped being able to talk—and minute 95 is where that finally lands.
Twain’s Young Satan offers Theodore a choice: forty-six years of paralyzed agony, or drowning in twelve days. Theodore agrees the drowning is better. So do you. That’s the problem.
The bagel cracks the marble walls and swallows everyone—we dig into sacred inner sanctums from the Holy of Holies to Shinto honden to figure out what the Daniels built here.
Satan doesn’t try to ruin anyone’s life—he just exists near them. A suitor’s courtship evaporates, a knife gets pulled, and chess games get replayed from memory. Twain’s devil, five weeks in.
Kynan curates a month of animated horror and discovers the throughline by accident: in animation, the artist is always the raw material. Perfect Blue, Mad God, and Stopmotion turn pop stardom, creation, and grief into bodies fed straight into the machine.
“Right is a tiny box invented by people who are afraid”—Jobu’s confrontation happens in a real former cathedral, and we trace the deleted draft that argued reality instead of feelings.
Satan slides into Father Adolf like a film, fills a bottle from nothing, and juggles a hundred brass balls—humiliating the priest so badly Paine’s fraud edition cut the scene entirely.