About Kee Kee

What happens when you spend five months driving around the country with your dog hoping that the lessons of the road will help you find inner peace—even though you don’t drive at night, or in the snow, or with less than a half tank of gas—with a faded decade-old Post-it Note that reads “I Welcome Change” plastered to your dashboard as a shining beacon of hope guiding the way?

For almost 14 years Kee Kee Buckley was a senior executive with one of Hollywood’s top motion picture production companies. After being laid off along with 2/3 of her company, she was faced with the reality that she could no longer define herself by her work. This, combined with the realization that working in Hollywood never really made her happy, shook her to the core. The resulting existential crisis led Kee Kee to do what was previously unthinkable for a classic overachiever who was never a fan of road trips: she loaded up her car, Princess Leia the Prius, with her dog, Yoda, and took to the U.S. highways with the hope that the lessons of the road would bring her shama, the Sanskrit word for peace and tranquility of the mind.

Along the way Kee Kee had cold sleepless nights camping on the California Coast; spent a week in the iconic American Gothic House; was taken in by a world-renowned curandera in Hot Springs, Arkansas and embraced by the local metaphysical community; found love and then lost it almost before it began; met an Alabama cowboy who taught her the importance of living with the cowgirl spirit; stumbled on a community of octogenarian Country Music Swing Hall of Famers who have gathered for a secret musical jamboree for three decades in the middle of the Arizona desert; packed up her life in Los Angeles and moved to Texas, and ultimately discovered the secret to living with shama.

Kee Kee and Yoda continued to take road trips together every year until his death on February 28, 2017.

She now calls rural New Jersey home, where she is writing, producing, and directing documentary films with her musician husband, including one about Sideman Jamboree—the secret musical gathering of octogenarians she discovered on her Seeking Shama road trip—and writing a book about the road trip adventures that helped her find inner peace.

Born and raised in Wisconsin, Kee Kee attended UW-Madison and Chicago-Kent College of Law and is a member of the Illinois State Bar. A trained yoga instructor, she was awarded a patent for her invention of the Shama Yoga Rug. Kee Kee is co-founder of the River Town Film Festival in Clinton, NJ. She is an avid gardener, and she and her husband, Eric Troyer, live in the woods with their Malinois-mix rescue dog, Lunabelle, and a family of very friendly deer.