BiO

iO Tillett Wright is an author, screenwriter and podcast creator. He has been a lecturer, photographer, journalist, curator, actor and community organizer.

iO has exhibited and curated art works in the US, Europe and Japan. His writing and photos have been published in The NY and LA Times, Vogue, T, Interview, NY Times and Oyster Magazines, Refinery29, Lenny Letter, etc. He has been published by Knopf, Ecco, Editions Du Seuil, Il Saggiatore, Virago, Ecco, Penguin and Suhrkamp Verlag. He has lectured at Stanford, Harvard, Princeton, and others, as well as for The Atlantic, Nike and other Fortune 500 companies.

He is the author of Darling Days: A Memoir (Ecco, 2016), host and producer of the hit podcast The Ballad of Billy Balls (Cadence 13, 2019), and Power Trip, (NY Magazine, 2021/2022), creator of the TED talk “50 Shades of Gay,” and founder and photographer behind the Self Evident Truths project, the largest photographic document of a single community in history. He also made “Self Evident Truths: 10,000 portraits of queer America” (Prestel, 2020), wrote “Oasis: Modern Desert Homes” (2020), and the forthcoming “First Home” (2026), both from Clarkson Potter.

iO is a life long direct-response relief organizer. He has been active in disaster relief, anti-racism, queer rights and pro-working class efforts since 2001.

He now lives in LA where he writes, both long form and for film and television, and in 2025 he will launch his new podcast “Catastrophe”.