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, Little Island, Harlem Stage, and beyond. She creates live works, films, site-specific/immersive, and music collaborations like Martyr’s Fiction and The New Frontier. She 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). Her presenting spaces include Lincoln Center, Park Avenue Armory, Works & Process-Guggenheim, Symphony Space, and National Sawdust, among receiving support from the Watermill Center, Brooklyn Filmmakers Collective, Baryshnikov Arts Center, La Mama, and others. She received the Sundance Uprise Grant, 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. She was a Rehearsal Director for Punchdrunk Sleep No More, and improviser with Trixie Whitley and Moor Mother. She’s the 2023 recipient of Watermill Center Nina Von Maltzahn Fellowship and the Ellis Beauregard Foundation Contemporary Dance Award. In 2024, she choreographed Limon Company’s The Quake that Held Them All and produced her company tour Put Away the Fire, dear, supported by NEFA NDP Grant.