Kitty Umiña is Ever-Evolving

As the Ecuadorian folklore goes, Umiña began as a mortal girl: the daughter of a chief and a healer, who learned the art of healing from her mother. When her mother died, Umiña inherited her work, becoming known for her kindness and her refusal to turn away anyone who needed her.

Her father's new wife, a sorceress, grew jealous of her. She tried to have Umiña killed and abandoned but with many failed attempts, the sorceress's vengeance turned toward Umiña's father, who was killed. Umiña mourned him at his grave until she, too, died. As the legend goes, the goddess’ heart became an emerald the size of an ostrich egg.

Umiña tells a story of survival, but more specifically, it is a story about what happens after survival. Umiña is repeatedly forced to become something else.

New York native Kitty Umiña found the story while searching through Ecuadorian folklore for a connection to a part of herself she had never fully known. Her father, who was adopted young, had little connection to his Ecuadorian family, while Kitty grew up primarily connected to her Puerto Rican side.

Choosing Umiña as her last name and musician name was an attempt to reach toward her forgotten roots, to create a bridge to a culture and lineage that had always felt just out of reach.

But the name fits her own contemporary narrative of the legend. Kitty, like Umiña, has spent much of her life in a state of evolving.

Cyanotype beach film stills. An aesthetic palette blended of man-made material, semiotics, and grounding Earth influences. Arcane fashion, beauty, and a hime haircut you’d know from a mile away. These all make up our muse of the hour. Pure light and energy filter through the room and make Kitty’s presence recognizable by anyone. But it’s taken years to ruminate and evolve into this version of herself.

At 16, she submitted to a Marc Jacobs open casting she had found on Instagram. She made it through the first round before the casting team discovered she was underage. Although the rejection stung, it didn’t erase the newfound calling for fashion. In college, she began posting herself online, experimenting with her appearance and expanding into makeshift online modeling– backdrops in the basement and iphone editorials, commence.

Using her face as a canvas, makeup became another way in. Kitty taught herself editorial makeup, experimenting with dark glamour and esoteric, bedazzled looks.

Still, the industry kept giving her reasons why she could not fit inside it; Kitty kept finding ways to make the box less relevant.

It took nearly a decade for her to book a major campaign in New York, the city she’s from and had dreamed of working in. That campaign, for Nike, came last November.

“I feel like I always kind of saw it in me, and I worked really hard to get here,” Kitty said. “I think a lot about the version of me that was like 19, literally in the basement, taking little iPhone pictures of myself and having a dream.”

By then, she had lived in Los Angeles, worked with various agencies, appeared in music videos, booked a Chanel editorial and learned something more valuable than immediate success: how to build a career without waiting for someone else to tell her she belonged in it.

“I think you have to be delusional,” Kitty said. “Like, you have to believe in yourself so fully, even if it makes no sense to anybody else, and even if it doesn't work out, like, so what? I feel like you learn something new about yourself within the process.”

This same philosophy eventually led her to her blooming career in music.

Storytelling always fascinated Kitty. She loved artists who built worlds around their work, particularly My Chemical Romance and their ability to unfold a narrative across music and image. She began passively thinking about making music years before she actually did it. If she ever made a first song, she already knew what she wanted to call it: Spiral.

After a breakup left her heartbroken, a recording session with her Producer Xander Amahd originally planned for someone else became hers. She showed up with nothing to lose. Within a few weeks, "Spiral" existed. Released in August 2025, Lady Gunn partnered with Kitty for the song’s music video watch party premiere.

The experimental pop sound, paired with psychedelic visuals that feel both earthly and otherworldly, “Spiral” set the tone of Umiña’s musical journey. It wasn’t simply Kitty's alias, but a world heavily inspired by sentimental ancestry, nature, spirituality, dreams and the constant movement between versions of oneself.

In late 2025, just as she began hitting a stride and finished writing “Mirrored Earth,” Kitty was hit by a car, a devastating experience that fractured more than bone.

With a fractured knee and shoulder, Kitty had to relearn how to walk, stretch, and use her body as she once did for castings and shoots. But, the sentimental being that she is, Kitty found that the aftermath was more than physical.

“There was this major sense of loss, of purity and now having this metal inside of me, but also a lot of grief. Loss of time, of friends and people I thought were going to be there for me,” Kitty said. “But there was also so much love in the process of seeing who really showed up for me…I had so much time to really sit with myself and it asked me to take a long pause about what I really wanted to do, because my first song had just come out. It all connects.”

A true Virgo at heart, Kitty confronted mortality with fierce emotion and determination. Undergoing aggressive physical therapy and at-home mobility exercising, within just a few months she was able to walk in New York Fashion Week, a goal she had made and conquered for herself.

Mentally, she described being able to break free from any irrelevant hesitations or insecurities, allowing her to be equally more present and excited for the future, wherever that leads. Spiritually, she takes meaning and purpose from the traumatic experience–with grace, might I add.

“The left side is our feminine side, and the right side is our masculine, and I got hit on my left side. They say when you break bone or fracture bone, it means that an old foundation was not serving you and crumbling,” Kitty shared. “I feel like having this extra metal is like a support system. It almost feels like it has made my feminine energy stronger, but it also reminds me I don't need to be super strong all the time because even in nature, you see how nature and metal or brick, all of these things kind of mold together and coexist. I think it's a beautiful way that nature mirrors our experiences.”

One year later, her sophomore single release for “Mirrored Earth” is just as well received as the debut. Seeped in beautiful aesthetics and meaning, the song brings an electric, dreamy, entranced sound paired with lyrics recollecting and reclaiming her experience from a past lover.

“I definitely feel like “Spiral” and “Mirrored Earth” are within the same world,” Kitty explained. ““Spiral” was a really good introduction because it’s like she’s born and wakes up in this unknown territory, there’s this back and forth with her higher self that’s visiting her in her dreams…Mirrored Earth is meant to feel like a haunted memory, but beautiful. It’s like every song is a death and rebirth.”

The “Mirrored Earth” music video releases this Friday, October 9 at 12 p.m. EST. The video gracefully takes Umiña back to a beach connected to a past relationship, the place where that temporary love began, where promises about forever had once been made. But this time she returns alone.

Various outfits, dreamy color editing, and angles of the ocean waves crashing against eroded rock all capture the essence of the song: the complexities of human emotion and connection. She walks through the landscape of a shared memory and gradually turns it into one of her own. She climbs the mountain they once climbed together, not to reclaim the relationship, but to release it.

Both the Goddess Umiña and Kitty’s mythologies are about being forced through transformation and discovering that something survives on the other side.

“I think the constant that we all have is change. A spiral is a constant change,” Kitty said. “We can keep circling something, but eventually, some things will feel smaller, some things will feel bigger the more time passes. But it all depends on what type of spiral you want to have, a downward or an upward growth.”

Between her intimate inner exploration, being a lover girl at heart, runway shows, writing music, and her art of self expression through clothing, makeup, and collaborative artistic projects, Kitty continues to explore herself and the world around her with a fresh perspective and care for simply being alive.

The emerald at the center of Umiña's story is a fitting place to leave her: something living, transformed by grief, made permanent without ever becoming lifeless.

Kitty is definitely a diamond in the making, but she’s not an emerald…yet. She is still becoming, and maybe she always will be.