She was born in Barrow, Alaska, United States, the first child of four from parents of Irish and French heritage. Bryson spent the first two years of her life in the Arctic village of Wainwright and, when she was three, her family moved to Kenai, where she lived until she was 18, whereupon she moved to Stockholm to study archaeology. In 1991, Bryson left Sweden and moved to Seattle. She graduated with BA degrees in Anthropology and Swedish from the University of Washington and was the recipient of the Peterson Family Scholarship for Outstanding Swedish Student of the Year. She arrived in London in September 1994 to attend postgraduate drama school at the London Academy of Performing Arts, where she also completed her MA in Independent Film and Video at the London College of Printing.
In 2001, Bryson's first novel, Mush, which details a menage-a-trois between three Alaskan women and focuses heavily on the Alaskan environment's wilderness, scents, sounds, was published by Diva Books (London). The description of the fictional town "Little Novgorod" is very similar to Bryson's hometown of Kenai. Mush received glowing reviews from literary journals such as Mslexia and from the wider gay press.
In late 2008, Bryson's second novel, Girl on a Stick, an urban novel detailing the breakdown of an ex-pat American woman's relationship, and featuring religious visions of the Virgin Mary atop the No. 38 Bus, was published by She Devil Press (an imprint of the San Francisco-based cutting-edge press Suspect Thoughts), and, like Mush, received positive reviews. She had written a shorter novel at the same time as writing Girl on a Stick, the Douglas Adamsesque He's Lucid (like her first novel Mush, set in Alaska, although far in the future in a landscape devastated by global warming). She was offered a two-book deal for these works in early 2005 by Suspect Thoughts Press.
Bryson has had numerous literary short stories published in various anthologies, including "The Day I Ate My Passport". Published in 2000 in the Lambda Award-winning collection The Diva Book of Short Stories, the story touches on her experiences of injustice at the hands of the British immigration system.
Bryson is represented by Laura Morris of the Laura Morris Agency.
In 1992, Bryson participated in a group exhibition at the infamous rock venue and ex-brothel, Seattle's OK Hotel. In 1993 and 1994, her first solo art exhibitions took place on Capitol Hill. During the same time period, she was a founding member of Thommy Goes Down, "the laziest Riot Grrl band in history").
Bryson used her enforced exile in Britain to produce four solo art exhibitions, "Monsters & Monsters" (1997), "The Hyperbled Heart" (1998), "Strange" (2002) and her retrospective exhibition "Wilderness", produced by Ms. Raj Rai, in 2003. Press praise came from Diva Magazine (“Bryson’s richly textured mixed-media artwork is beautiful, unsettling and weird. A strange, tusked hermaphrodite cruises for sex amidst the tangled greenery of Nunhead Cemetery. In the other-worldly light of an icy forest, a gleaming cyborg sprawls beneath drifting snowflakes”) and Urban 75 (“Glamorous gorgons and beautiful banshees dazzle and dance their way into your subconscious at Kathleen Bryson’s stunning art show at the Prowler Gallery, King’s X. Imagine the shamanic majesty of Norwegian spiritualist painter Frans Widerberg crossed with the punk energy of Iggy and the Stooges and you won’t even be halfway there. In a culture dominated by the tyranny of the bland, miss this vibrant and heart-warming display at the peril of your own beleaguered imagination.”).
She has since had two additional solo shows: "Lucky Charms" (2005) and "The Wolves of Candyland" (2009).
In early 2002, Bryson wrote the screenplay for the feature film The Viva Voce Virus, which she co-directed with Finnish director Kimmo Moykky, a surreal time-travel thriller about the Hollywood closeting system. The film was completed in November 2008, and had its world premiere at Portland's Siren Nation Film Festival on November 5, 2008. The UK Premiere took place in York at the Cine25 Film Festival in February 2009. Bryson has also had numerous short film accepted and screened at various festivals, including Ladyfest Olympia Film Festival, Bumbershoot, Flixation and My Pretty Portland / Art Institute of Portland Competition.
She is currently in pre-production for her second feature, Spaceships Over Corvallis, which she has also written.
Bryson acted under the name Kiirik Bryson for several years, though she now uses "Kathleen Bryson". Kiirik is an Inupiaq name which was given to her shortly after birth in Wainwright, Alaska. Recent screenings of her lead roles in acting work have been in the films I Want to be a Secretary (dir. Sarah Wood, Winner: Best Film, London Short Film Festival 2007), Surrender (dir. Sarah Wood), a dreamy and Sherman-esque experimental short screened at London's National Film Theatre and in a number of festivals. She also played Diana Dors in I am Diana Dors (dir. Ali Smith), screened at the Cambridge International Film Festival, 2004. All three were produced by Woo Hoo Productions.
Bryson has done some part-time modeling, and had appeared both in Rankin's SNOG art exhibition in Brick Lane, London 2000 and in his Snog book as well. Bryson also appeared in the book Red Threads (Parminder Sekhon, photographer) as a gangster moll, on a book cover for Ice Queen, Virgin Publishing in 2000 (Parminder Sekhon, photographer), in a 2001 feature article for The Observer's LIFE Magazine photographed by John Stoddart in 2001, and ongoing as the "Face of Diva Magazine 2004" in a series of subscriptions ads for Diva Magazine in 2004 (Venetia Elphick, photographer).
Controversially, Bryson, who describes herself as bisexual (except for what she jokingly referred to as her "3-month lesbian separatist period" in the fall of 1994), has been clear in several interviews that she does not consider either heterosexuality or homosexuality to have a genetic basis, but rather considers them to be the result of many social and environmental factors. From a 2002 interview with Rainbow Network: "People often forget that 'gayness' and 'heterosexuality' are new concepts, less than a hundred and fifty years old... 'Straight' and 'gay' and 'bisexual' are all social constructions anyway, but until the world is more comfortable with same-sex desire I'll be calling myself bisexual, as that word comes the closest to describing my own personal make-up."
In another interview from the same time, she said, "I choose to be queer, and I'm proud of my choice. I'm sick of gay people saying 'it's not my fault,' like being queer is something to be ashamed of." More radically, she suggested the following: "I truly believe that all people are born with bisexual potential, and I feel strongly that the onus should now be on "heterosexuals" to come out, as queer people have already done enough hard work questioning sexual mores."
In London, Bryson was a member of the direct-action pressure group Lesbian Avengers, where she met a long-term girlfriend. Together they fought to have the British immigration system recognise their relationship so that Bryson could get a visa to stay in the country. The case was to drag out 5 years, and Bryson was only allowed to travel freely in the summer of 1999. She has said that she will never forgive the UK Immigration Service for not allowing her to visit her California-based dying grandfather in 1998 (Pink Paper Interview, 2003).
Bryson is on record in 2004 for having said that she's truly fallen in love twice: once with a man and once with a woman (Diva Magazine, 2004). She describes herself as a serial monogamist.
