This story appears in i-D 374, The Unknown Issue.
written by THORA SIEMSEN
photography AIDAN ZAMIRI
styling CLARE BYRNE
casting director JENNIFER VENDITTI
Enza Khoury is looking back on life. She’s 18 now, and she’ll graduate this spring from her public high school in Chagrin Falls, Ohio, a storybook village with approximately 4,000 residents just east of Cleveland. Named after the waterfalls along the Chagrin River that runs through town, it’s a picturesque place to live. Notable landmarks include the Chagrin Falls Popcorn Shop, the longstanding Chagrin Valley Little Theatre on the other side of Main Street Bridge. In mid-January there’s snow on the ground, and the eponymous falls are nearly frozen over. Enza, a statuesque beauty with strands of blue tinsel throughout her long dark hair, brims with the age-appropriate desire to get out of here as soon as possible.
“My goal is to travel,” she says, perched on a chair in her dad’s second-storey office overlooking the main drag of town. “I have lots of friends who are very spontaneous, which I appreciate so much, because I love living like that when it’s appropriate.” An aspiring actress, she wants to move to New York City. It’s a seven-hour drive from Chagrin Falls, and she and her dad have made the trek together only once, for university visits. She hopes to get into The New School, her favourite of the campuses they toured during their trip, and defer enrollment for a year. Her only concrete plan for her gap year so far is joining her dentist opa (her paternal grandfather of Syrian descent) on a mission trip to Tanzania. She’d love to see Syria, too, someday: “My dad and I have always said that whenever it calms down there, hopefully in our lifetime, we’re going to go together and be able to experience where I come from.”
“Enza doesn’t want to act to be famous or to be seen. She really loves the idea of creating and experiencing humanity through her embodiment of it.”
JENNIFER VENDITTI
Enza is already immersed in the world of acting. Her school boasts an affiliated Academy for the Performing Arts, where she takes classes in performing for both the camera and the stage. When she doesn’t have after-school rehearsal for the Academy’s production of Shakespeare’s Twelfth Night, in which she plays Olivia, she works at a local cinema, her idea of the ultimate teenage job ever since she was a kid. Her number one movie right now is Barry Jenkins’ Moonlight. She recently loved Sean Baker’s Anora so much that she added it to her Four Favorites on Letterboxd. Her closest friends are either colleagues from the movie theatre or fellow Academy students. One of Enza’s acting teachers, Academy’s artistic director, Dan Hendrock—who gets cool points with her for not only being caught up on the current season of RuPaul’s Drag Race, but also knowing contestant Onya Nurve personally—tells me, “My favourite thing about Enza is that she is fearless. She will make big, bold choices that I love, and it makes audiences fall in love with her.”
Her classmate and fellow Twelfth Night cast member Laila Hancock, 17, agrees: “Enza’s always been really good. Last year, she had the lead in a play,” referring to the school’s production of Molière’s Tartuffe. “She’s always been very outgoing, I think. Whenever we would do our exercises, she wasn’t afraid.” Both Enza and Laila started acting just last year. In Hendrock’s class they’re currently working on taped auditions for under-fives, meaning roles in which the character has fewer than five lines of dialogue, also known as bit parts. The students tape their auditions in class, then watch the recordings back and critique them together, praising each other and isolating instances where they look at the camera or stammer awkwardly. Right now, Enza prefers screen acting—and she does have a subtlety that works particularly well for the medium—though she’s happy to do it all.
“I was not in the theatre world or acting, anything even adjacent to that, until my junior year,” Enza says in between class and rehearsal. “Ever since then, I’ve been in a production back-to-back-to-back, several over the summertime. I’ve just really fallen in love with it. I’m really grateful to feel this way about something.” Both Hendrock and Abraham Adams, her theatre instructor and the director of Twelfth Night, separately tell me the performing arts sphere attracts misfits. Enza’s time studying acting has nearly perfectly overlapped with the time she’s been out as trans in her community. No matter where she is on campus, she’ll walk over to the Academy side to use the toilet. She eats lunch alone in the black box theatre. The only other transfeminine person in her life is an Academy classmate.
Prior to her junior year, Enza had been stealth—meaning that she passed as cis and did not disclose her transness to her peers—since first grade. The decision to come out in small-town Ohio was not hers, but she’s made the best of it. “People were curious, because there’s not that many people in my grade, and the most interesting thing for people to talk about is me and my business,” she laments. There have been challenges, even in corners where one would expect care. “Teachers are just as bad as students. Even though they’re adults, they’ve lived their entire lives in high schools. They go to high school, then they stay in high school to be a teacher, and so they act like it.”
Enza is certainly coming of age at an interesting time. Currently, only 18 states plus the District of Columbia have trans “shield” laws protecting access to transgender health care. Ohio is not one of them. In fact, according to data compiled by the Movement Advancement Project think tank, the state notably “bans or restricts best practice medical care for transgender youth.” Last November, Ohio’s Republican governor, Mike DeWine, signed a bill restricting transgender students’ use of toilets. Passed by the Ohio Senate, SB 104 (the so-called Protect All Students Act) is effective as of February 25 this year. Vice President of the United States JD Vance hails from Ohio and represents a Trump administration that, on the first day of its second term, issued an executive order called “Defending Women from Gender Ideology Extremism and Restoring Biological Truth to the Federal Government,” which aims to roll back trans rights.
As for what makes her generation special, Enza cites their weathering of two Trump elections and the Covid lockdown. Her age group also largely has no pre-internet memories. They’re negotiating the acceptable ways to use artificial intelligence in their education. My visit overlaps with the TikTok ban briefly going into effect, which she and her classmates regard with an eye roll. “I think it’s ridiculous,” Enza says. “The actual Chinese version of TikTok is an app called Rednote. It’s like the same thing. Now a bunch of Americans are on that app. No matter what you try to do, people are always going to have their voice be heard, people are always going to find a way to express themselves.” She thinks efforts to ban are “almost out of pettiness. The whole entire system is like . . . children.” Her app of choice is Pinterest: “If you create it to be your own, it’s never anything negative at all.”
“I just found her to be very mesmerising. I want to hear her talk. I want to hear what she wants to do in the world.”
JENNIFER VENDITTI
Another way Enza tunes out negativity is by slipping on her over-ear wireless headphones. “I listen to people like Frank Ocean—I love his voice. Steve Lacy. I love R&B and rap.” She associates driving into New York City for the first time with the Blood Orange song “Champagne Coast.” “What I look for more is not the lyrics or the person who made the music, it’s the beat and how it makes me feel.” Still, she does listen to the news, in small doses: “I try to limit my attention on media that is against my whole existence. It very much makes me get in my head about myself. It happens to me in real life enough. I don’t need to bring it into my personal life when I’m trying to have my own time. Sometimes I will. Obviously I need to stay updated on what is happening in the world.”
Luckily, Enza has support. She comes from a big family, especially for such a small town. Her birth mother and five of her six siblings attended, or attend, her high school. Her dad, Adam Zimmerman, a handsome co-founder of an advertising technology company, marshals the remaining household members together for dinner seven nights a week. If Enza misses it, they save her a plate. “There’s so much love at our table that it’s her way of getting that daily dose of love,” Adam says. When they include me in the ritual, her stepmum, Kristen Zimmerman, who exudes a comforting presence, sets out homemade kale salad, a slow-cooked lentil potato soup, and two loaves of freshly baked bread. For their mealtime grace, they hold hands and sing a song called “The Lord Is Good to Me.”
Next to their dinner table is a tank that hosts Mr. Bubbles, a carnival goldfish who is now 13 years old and thriving. Two Huskies called Nne and Tano (meaning four and five in Swahili, respectively) wait patiently nearby. Well-trained siblings from the same litter, Nne and Tano are the family’s fourth and fifth dogs. Their previous dogs were named after Swahili numbers as well. Spice, the family’s 14-year-old cat, is nowhere to be seen. While passing me a glass of non-alcoholic red wine, Kristen deadpans, “I always joke that Adam is just good at keeping things alive, between seven kids, two dogs and a cat and a fish, the numerous plants in the house, it’s a lot … And I don’t help at all with the plants. That’s all Adam, too.”
It’s true that abundant houseplant vines wrap around the exposed beams of their lodge-style home, which is sequestered on a quiet, forested lane. A five-minute drive from downtown Chagrin Falls, the house manages to feel like a bohemian retreat from the preppy enclave nearby. Enza’s room on the first floor is spacious. She has posters of all the plays and musicals she’s been in taped to the ceiling above her bed, where she sleeps with her Pokémon plushies. Several bottles of Arabic perfume by the brand Lattafa, a gift from Kristen, are displayed near her PC setup for gaming. A stack of Harry Potter hardcovers prop up a makeup mirror on her vanity, the remainder of the series lining the shelves next to her collections of Monster High dolls and airsoft guns. This space is where Enza meticulously plans her outfits for the next day each night.
Part of what makes Enza so cool is that she never seems to pander to what we—fashion magazine writers or readers—think is cool. When I ask about her love of clothes, she doesn’t name a single designer. (She does aim to eschew fast fashion for environmental reasons.) “Eccentric, sci-fi vibes,” she says, describing her style. “Very magical. That’s what I try to go for. I take inspiration from video games, fantasy, and anime. With each outfit I make, I create a story behind it. Every single outfit I have is like a new person. I can be whoever I want through fashion. It’s a very good way for me to be calm.” When the students recently brainstormed in one of her classes about which types they’d be cast as actors, Enza was delighted by feedback that she could be a water nymph or a final girl in a horror movie.
“I can be whoever I want through fashion. It’s a very good way for me to be calm.”
ENZA KHOURY
Jennifer Venditti, the casting director responsible for choosing Hunter Schafer to play Jules on Euphoria, was also the one to select Enza for i-D’s cover. “[Enza] doesn’t want to act to be famous or to be seen,” Venditti tells me over the phone. “She really loves the idea of creating and experiencing humanity through her embodiment of it. I just found her to be very mesmerising. I want to hear her talk. I want to hear what she wants to do in the world.” Venditti tells me the casting process became a captivating window into the psyche of today’s teenage girl. She was fascinated by how many girls picked their mums when asked who they’d put on the cover of a magazine, and by the number of them who have an activist streak.
Out of her family, I bet Enza would choose her younger brother Ari to be a cover star. A year and a half apart, they consider each other Irish twins. Ari is in the grade below her at school, where he also attends an afternoon art programme. “We’re like each other’s muses,” Enza tells me. They go over lines together when she’s rehearsing for plays. Last year, when she was in a filmmaking class, she cast him in her short. If Enza herself seems comfortable in front of the camera, it’s in no small part thanks to her brother orchestrating creative photoshoots with her as the model. Now, Ari is getting into oil painting. “He’s like, ‘Send me any image and I’ll paint it.’ I sent him a picture of unicorns, and now he’s making a beautiful painting,” she says. After dinner, the two of them take me to Ari’s studio, separate from the main house, to show me the work in progress. It’s a lovely portrait of a special being.
hair LUCAS WILSON USING BUMBLE AND BUMBLE & GA.MA PROFESSIONAL AT DAY ONE
makeup MARCELO GUTIERREZ USING SIMIHAZE BEAUTY AT BRYANT ARTISTS
photography assistants ROWAN LIEBRUM & BEN SUSTER
styling assistants CHARLOTTE FOLEY & ALICE M. WARAXA
production THE MORRISON GROUP
associate producer VINCE BARRUCCO
production assistant BAILEY ROGERS
post production POST APOLLO & AIDAN ZAMIRI
location ACADEMY FOR THE PERFORMING ARTS AT CHAGRIN FALLS HIGH SCHOOL
friends ABRIANA HENDERSON, FRANKIE ASHKETTLE, GINA RAQUEL GARDNER, LAILA HANCOCK, MICHAEL JAMAAL FLONNOY JR., ROMAN KLINE-BOSSMAN
siblings ARI ZIMMERMAN & MAJA ZIMMERMAN