About this Artist
Kayla Farrish is a Black American Director merging dance-theater, filmmaking, narrative, and sound score. She captures ranging identity, the mythical dualities of history and present survival, and powerful dreaming lending to liberation.
Her commissions include Limon Dance Company, Gibney, Louis Armstrong House Museum, Danspace, Pepatian, Little Island, Harlem Stage, Blacklight Summit and beyond. Some works formed: Black Bodies Sonata, The New Frontier: My dear America, Sunny Side/Inside the Laughing Barrel, December 8th, Martyr’s Fiction, and others. She creates live works, films, site-specific/immersive, and collaborations. She recently shared Choir (Carrie Mae Weems Exhibition), To Dream A Lifetime (BlackLight), Roster with Melanie Charles, MIXTAPES with Alex MacKinnon and site-specific Broken Record (Little Island) with Brandon Coleman, and Rinsing and Harbor films. Presenting spaces include Lincoln Center, Park Avenue Armory, Symphony Space, and National Sawdust, among receiving support from Watermill Center for the Arts, Armstrong Now, Brooklyn Filmmakers Collective, Baryshnikov Arts Center, La Mama Experimental Theater, and others.
She received the Sundance Uprise Grant for Emerging BIPOC Directors, Bessie Awards for NYLA’s Motherboard Suite and December 8th-Gibney, NY Times Top 2021 Dance Performances- Roster and Breakout Star. She is a recipient of the Harkness Promise Award for 2022. During 2022, she was a Rehearsal Director for Punchdrunk Sleep No More, and adjunct faculty for NYU Tisch Dance. During 2023, she created new works for Arizona State University, LINES dance Training Program, University of Arizona. She has been commissioned to create a reimagined archival work for Limon Dance Company, and to collaborate with musician Trixie Whitley, for her new music tour. In her next company project, Put Away the Fire, dear, she is touring a group narrative work of radical imagination and liberation, supported by NEFA NDP Touring Dance Production Grant. She is also the 2023 recipient of Watermill Center Nina Von Maltzahn Fellowship and the Ellis Beauregard Foundation Contemporary Dance Award.