It's the sort of emotionally wrought scene one expects in a work by Petra Collins, the 23-year-old, New York-based artist who has created photographs of Selena Gomez as a disillusioned cheerleader and of Kim Kardashian as a sultry angel: doctors tell a 15-year-old aspiring ballerina that she'll never dance again. Except it's not a photograph; it's what happened to Collins in her native Toronto after she snapped her left knee nine years ago. "The doctors told me that I would never dance again," she says. "My life was over for a second, and I didn't know what I was going to do. Art was—and is—my biggest outlet. I'd probably die if I didn't do it."

Collins's medium is film; she avoids digital photography. "Because I loved dance, I always need to be physical and moving, so photography that is more tactile made more sense," she says, noting that her earliest works were created on disposable cameras.

"On film, you really have to focus on what you're looking at. You're imprinting a physical image." She was still a teenager when she started exhibiting in New York, and magazines such as Vice, i-D, and Purple began commissioning her for shoots. Last fall, Rizzoli published a book of photographs, and another is on the way.

Collins's ethereal 70s aesthetic has landed her in front of the camera, too. Gucci creative director Alessandro Michele has cast her in campaigns, and she played the recurring character Agnyss on Transparent. These days, her focus is on directing. Last year, she directed Carly Rae Jepsen's sparkling "Boy Problems" video; it helped land the song, which originally wasn't intended to be a single, on the charts. Next up, she plans to take on a horror film: "It's a genre that you can subvert and create any story, because it can be cathartic—or just scare the shit out of you."