Zelda Adams

By Kate Sibery 

Illustration by Justin Chen

When I met with Zelda Adams, CC ’26, at a cafe in the Lower East Side in mid-August, we got smoothies, which isn’t something I would normally order, but she had told me they were good there. “It’s funny seeing you here now,” I told her, “because I feel like I have been sort of stalking you for a few weeks now.” Zelda laughed and a semi-truck set off a series of honks, making it so that we had to wait a few seconds before I could clarify what I meant. 

I have watched a video of Zelda showing people how to eat a date (split in half, remove pit, add butter, and enjoy). I also watched a video of Zelda trying a Kinder Bueno for the first time with her boyfriend, Luke. I watched a video of her eating a croissant in Paris and putting labne on a ham and butter sandwich bought from a vending machine (apparently, the combination isn’t half bad). I know from my research that you can also watch her kill a series of men with the help of the devil, sew her parents’ body parts together to keep them alive, or eat a bunch of maggots. The food videos can be found on her TikTok account, @grilledjesus, the account that got her scouted to be a model at 17 years old. The maggot-eating, by contrast, is a feature of the horror movie “Hellbender,” and her companionship with the devil is part of a different horror movie, “The Hatred,” both of which were written, directed, produced, filmed, edited, and acted in by Zelda, her parents John Adams and Toby Poser, and her older sister Lulu—together, the Adams family. 

Since she was six years old, Zelda has been an actress, and since she was 10 years old, she has been a filmmaker. “It’s such a cool feeling to be able to see myself at six years old in front of a camera and at 8 years old and 10 years old,” she told me. “It’s very trippy, but it’s such a privilege too. And it’s also really cool to see how I’ve grown as a filmmaker as well. When I was 6 I wasn’t directing, but once I turned 10 I was far more interested in what’s going on behind the camera. So, I’ve seen myself grow up in front of and behind the camera.” 

Filmmaking was a near-permanent fixture of Zelda’s nomadic childhood. Although there’s a wooden clapboard house in Upstate New York that Zelda considers home, growing up she spent long periods on the road with her family, driving across the country and making movies. By the time she was 13, the family had filmed several dramas and a thriller, but as Zelda explained it to me, “We were getting a little bit bored, and so one winter I was like ‘Dad, what if we made a movie about a girl killing a bunch of grown men?’ And so my dad and I just made this hour-long film about the Revolutionary War and this girl who is just getting revenge on a bunch of grown men, and it was awesome.” That movie, called “The Hatred,” solidified the family’s love for the horror genre and the horror community, which Zelda described to me as being much more welcoming to independent filmmakers. 

Zelda would be a great person to bring up in any argument for predestination. Besides the obvious Adams/Addams Family comparison, there is also the fact that her birthday falls on the day before Halloween. “It’s fitting because I’m considered like a ‘Hell Nighter’ which, you know what, hell yeah! I think I was also born for this life because of the whole Adams family last name. Two things adding up here.” Zelda also spent a year living in the Alpha Delta Phi (ADP) brownstone on 114th Street, which has on several occasions been used as the set of a haunted house. 

There is some irony in referring to Zelda as a “Campus Character.” The demands of her career as an actress, independent filmmaker, and model mean that she is often far from Columbia. Modeling, especially, often has her traveling from New York to Paris or London during the semester. She has been on the cover of Vogue Greece, 10 magazine, Le Figaro Style, and has modeled for designer brands Gucci, Prada, and Ralph Lauren. Modeling didn’t come up much in our conversations, though. The principles of modeling—the overt judgment, the artificiality, and, simply put, the brutality of it—are all quite antithetical to what I, and other people close to her, know of Zelda. Siri Storstein, CC ‘26, who has been friends with Zelda since meeting her in their freshman year Literature Humanities class, told me, “I think one of the most important things in my relationship with Zelda is that she’s the least judgmental person I have ever met, which makes her incredibly easy to be around.” I saw this quality in her for myself as we talked about living in New York City over our smoothies, and Zelda asked me about my favorite places in the city to have a good cry. I suggested the ledge in Riverside Park and also behind Avery Library, among some other places that I will keep to myself. She pointed out that I should try the fire escape of the Maison Française, which I hadn’t considered until she mentioned it. 

While hanging out in the East Village, we ran into one of Zelda’s friends, Tessa, whom she had met in Paris through modeling. When I explained that I was writing a piece about Zelda for a campus magazine, she told me that I should mention all the great things about Zelda that she would never mention about herself. It reminded me of something Siri had said to me: “She [Zelda] truly has more talent in her pinky than the rest of all of us combined, and it expands in so, so many different fields, and creativities, and the way her mind works, and she somehow doesn’t know it and remains incredibly humble. I think that anybody close to her can see it, knows it, and would agree with me.” 

The next time I see Zelda, we’re planning to go get ice cream. It’s actually something we’ve been wanting to do for about two years, but will have to wait until the semester starts since she’s headed Upstate to do some filming with her family—they are making a short film to be played at the Telluride Horror Show, a horror film festival that will be held in Telluride, Colorado in October. “It’s just a super spontaneous short about one of the festival organizers coming to our home in the Catskills to say our film has been rejected and then we kill him.”