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
Twain the riverboat pilot takes Noah’s Ark apart professionally: no rudder, no sails, no compass, no pumps, no anchors. Eleven months at sea. The additional ark was not provided.
Jobu holds out her hand and says at least this way she doesn’t have to do it alone—and we finally name what this movie has been about the entire time. Don’t stop at this minute.
‘You have noticed that the human being is a curiosity.’ Satan’s flattest and funniest line yet opens a letter that ends with God’s parenting record. Twain is not in a forgiving mood.
Tommy Metz III leads a triple feature on haunted objects: The Ring, Oculus, and undertone. In all three, the tape or the mirror or the recording shows up at a house where parenting failed, and stuff holds a grudge.
“Language” gets the first laugh in ten minutes, rendered laughter becomes an idea instead of a sound, and Jobu turns out to belong to a very specific villain archetype. We trace it.
Man invented a heaven and left out sex. Replaced it with harps and twelve-hour prayer. Satan’s dispatches from Earth begin, and Twain saved his sharpest work for last.
Michelle Yeoh insisted rocks don’t speak English, the Daniels cut the sun time-lapse for being too energetic, and Sylvester and the Magic Pebble is genuinely upsetting in a picture book.
Unlike the Western devil, the Oni doesn’t want your soul. No bargain, no temptation, no test of virtue. It wants to eat your body. Devil’s Details steps outside the Judeo-Christian house for a demon deep dive.
Thirty-eight seconds, sixty-nine universes, and a wink directly at the audience—we go frame by frame on episode 100 and find that the rock we thought was grey was always blue.
Twain’s Chronicle cuts off mid-magic trick in India. The famous ending—nothing exists, you are but a vagrant thought—is Paine’s theft. We read it anyway. It still lands.