Ayden Massey is an interdisciplinary artist and MS candidate in Harvard Medical School’s Media, Medicine, and Health program. Based in New York and Boston, Massey’s creative work spans film, poetry, and sculpture.

Their critical media practice interrogates binary systems and the biosocial conditions of sexual citizenship, approaching sexual trauma as a medical hyperobject through which certain bodies are rendered excess, disposable, or clinically illegible. Through processes of medical encryption, their work translates institutional logics of classification, containment, and waste into material and moving-image forms, foregrounding the limits of care and recognition.

Massey’s exploration of epigenetic trauma, survivorship, and queer temporality has been recognized across the literary and visual arts, with work appearing in All Existing, Apricity, Hawai‘i Pacific Review, Idiosyncrazy Magazine, The Kollection, and a finalist mention in The New York Times Found Poem Contest. Their debut book, American Nesting Doll, received dual Pushcart Prize nominations in 2025.