DEVELOPED WITH PARTICIPANT
KERRY MAGRO
Autism has no look.
KERRY MAGRO
A bath is running down the hall, and four-year-old Kerry Magro won't go near it. The sound of water alone can end in screaming, and so can a switch from one room to another, an unfamiliar face, a change in plan. He has just been diagnosed with PDD-NOS - what would now fall under autism spectrum disorder - and by then two preschools have already asked his parents to find somewhere else for him. He has very little speech, motor delays that make ordinary coordination harder than it looks, and most days he'd rather be alone.
His parents, Robert and Suzanne, spend the next several years looking for anything that might help him communicate and take part in ordinary life. Speech therapy, occupational therapy, physical therapy - some form of it continues through most of his childhood and into his teens.
Along the way, they notice what reaches him: a Disney movie he watches on repeat, working through the lines and the movements until they're his own. It becomes a habit, then a kind of practice - timing, expression, the rhythm of holding someone's attention. Kerry keeps performing through childhood and adolescence. He won't think of it as training for anything else until years later, when he's the one standing at a podium instead of a stage.
Kerry knew basketball before he could really play it. He memorized players, teams and stats, while the physical side of the game was much harder for him. He didn’t make the high school team on his first try. He trained, lost about 60 pounds, made varsity as a sophomore and later became captain. Seton Hall’s alumni magazine would later describe that period as the point when college began to feel possible to him.
His parents, Robert and Suzanne, spend the next several years looking for anything that might help him communicate and take part in ordinary life. Speech therapy, occupational therapy, physical therapy - some form of it continues through most of his childhood and into his teens.
Along the way, they notice what reaches him: a Disney movie he watches on repeat, working through the lines and the movements until they're his own. It becomes a habit, then a kind of practice - timing, expression, the rhythm of holding someone's attention. Kerry keeps performing through childhood and adolescence. He won't think of it as training for anything else until years later, when he's the one standing at a podium instead of a stage.
Kerry knew basketball before he could really play it. He memorized players, teams and stats, while the physical side of the game was much harder for him. He didn’t make the high school team on his first try. He trained, lost about 60 pounds, made varsity as a sophomore and later became captain. Seton Hall’s alumni magazine would later describe that period as the point when college began to feel possible to him.
Around eleven, Kerry first learns that he is autistic after asking a teacher why other kids call him “special.” A few years later, he begins reading about autism for himself, trying to make sense of what he reads in relation to his own experience.
At Seton Hall, a freshman Oral Communication class asks students to speak about something they know well. Kerry picks autism and basketball, and plans to end the talk by telling the room he's autistic - something he has told almost no one up to that point. When the moment arrives, he freezes. He gets through it anyway, and says it. The class doesn't flinch. That's enough to change how openly he talks about himself from then on.
At Seton Hall, a freshman Oral Communication class asks students to speak about something they know well. Kerry picks autism and basketball, and plans to end the talk by telling the room he's autistic - something he has told almost no one up to that point. When the moment arrives, he freezes. He gets through it anyway, and says it. The class doesn't flinch. That's enough to change how openly he talks about himself from then on.
He starts a Student Disability Awareness group on campus that same year. The idea behind it - that saying it out loud, on purpose, might be worth something - later grows into KFM Making A Difference, the nonprofit he still runs.
The will of opportunity - the path of autism to college | Kerry Magro | TEDxJerseyCity
He is not, by his own account, especially good at math. His strengths turned out to be elsewhere: performance, communication, basketball, writing, working with people - the kind of things that don't usually show up on a transcript but turn out to matter when you're standing in front of a few hundred strangers. He finishes a bachelor's in business administration with a concentration in sports management, then a master's in strategic communication and leadership, then in 2019 an Ed.D. in Educational Technology Leadership.
The talks kept going after school did. Kerry has now given more than 1,400 of them, including two TEDx talks and a session at Google.
He's written several books - Defining Autism From the Heart, Autism and Falling in Love, Supporting Your Autism Journey - and edited two collections of other autistic people's writing, Autistics on Autism and its follow-up.
The talks kept going after school did. Kerry has now given more than 1,400 of them, including two TEDx talks and a session at Google.
He's written several books - Defining Autism From the Heart, Autism and Falling in Love, Supporting Your Autism Journey - and edited two collections of other autistic people's writing, Autistics on Autism and its follow-up.
Studios have started asking him to look at scripts and casting before they film: Joyful Noise, Jane Wants a Boyfriend, HBO's Mrs. Fletcher, Netflix's Love on the Spectrum U.S.
He advises on how autism gets portrayed, which is its own kind of continuity - the same habit that once meant repeating a movie until the lines were his, now applied to whether a script gets it right.
He advises on how autism gets portrayed, which is its own kind of continuity - the same habit that once meant repeating a movie until the lines were his, now applied to whether a script gets it right.
KFM Making A Difference funds college scholarships for autistic students - 162 of them over twelve years, as of its most recent count in October 2024 - along with support for other disability programs, some of it backed by grants from companies like Walmart and TD Bank.
In 2014, Kerry also started a sensory-friendly Santa event in New Jersey. It's built around a memory of his own: how unbearable a loud, crowded holiday scene used to be for him as a kid, and how much of that could be taken out of the room instead of asked of him.
In 2014, Kerry also started a sensory-friendly Santa event in New Jersey. It's built around a memory of his own: how unbearable a loud, crowded holiday scene used to be for him as a kid, and how much of that could be taken out of the room instead of asked of him.
The event, and a children's book he published about it in 2024, have since helped more than 500 children with disabilities meet Santa somewhere calmer.
What happens to children with autism, when they become adults? | Kerry Magro | TEDxMorristown
None of this means the difficulty went away. Kerry still deals with sensory overload. He's written about how hard it can be to read body language, and about eye contact - not that he can't manage it, but that holding someone's gaze in a bright or loud room takes so much of his attention that he stops being able to listen. So he doesn't force it. After long stretches of talking with people, he needs time alone to recover - the same way he did at four.
