About

IHaveABody; The future is not written in your genes but with your imagination! A documentary written and directed by Theresa Byrnes and filmed and edited by Craig Youngren. 

IHaveBody maps a thirty-year journey from 1996, when I, along with seven childhood friends, incorporated the Theresa Byrnes Foundation in Australia, raising over a quarter of a million dollars through art auctions, to fund scientific research aimed at developing a treatment and cure for Friedreich’s Ataxia. Now, in 2025, a treatment has become available. 

In 1997, I was featured on a “60 Minutes” episode campaigning for research, and they quoted me saying, 'It's a race against time regarding developing treatment or a cure for FA. Not waiting to be freed and too excited about living to be healed, seeing disability as a new way of seeing the world, not as illness. I moved to New York, newly in a wheelchair, to further my career as an artist. 

A life led by painting and fired by social justice, the“IHaveABody” documentary highlights my performance art, the painting processes, and the amazing people I have met along the way. Featuring interviews with an Aboriginal elder, scientists, artists, and a Buddhist sensei. It also features my workouts, emphasizing how physical training serves as a powerful communication between mind, body, and will.

The IHaveAbody documentary explores the profound distinction between having a body and being a body. An engaging narrative that examines the complex relationship we have with our physical selves. The coaction of art and physics, soul and science, and the connection between the belief in ownership of land versus the understanding of the custodianship of the Earth.

Theresa’s community in NEW YORK and in SYDNEY journey with her in her art and truth-seeking. Training and creating consistently with the effects of (FA) on her body, we rise with her to the Challenge of Suffering and see that the future is not written by our genes but with our imagination!

DETAILS & DONATE HERE -
https://fundraising.fracturedatlas.org/the-theresa-byrnes-projects/campaigns/5364