Kayla Farrish

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 pieces, and collaborations. She recently shared Choir (Carrie Mae Weems Exhibition), To Dream A Lifetime (BlackLight Summit), Roster with Melanie Charles, MIXTAPES with Alex MacKinnon and site-specific Broken Record (Little Island) with Brandon Coleman, and Rinsing & Harbor short films. Presenting spaces include Lincoln Center, Park Avenue Armory, Symphony Space, La Mama Experimental Theater, and National Sawdust, among receiving support from Dance Films Association, Brooklyn Filmmakers Collective, and others. Residencies housed her creativity through B.AA.D!, Chez Bushwick, BAX, Petronio Residency Center, Baryshnikov Arts Center, and Gallim.

She’s recognized by 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 for Roster and a 2021 Breakout Star. In 2022, she received the Harkness Promise Award, and was a Rehearsal Director for Punchdrunk Sleep No More and adjunct faculty for NYU Tisch Dance. In 2023, she was commissioned for Limon Dance Company, Trixie Whitley, Arizona State University, Danielle Wood/MIT, LINES Training Program, and University of Arizona. She taught for BODYTRAFFIC, New Dialect, and Gallim Intensives. In her upcoming company project, Put Away the Fire, dear, she tours group narrative work through NEFA NDP Dance Production Grant, ODC Theater, Joyce Theater, The Watermill Center, Harkness/92Y and Guggenheim Works & Process.

Kayla Farrish - Narrative, Character, Relationship, and World- Building

My class merges possibilities within narrative construction, character development through ourselves, the potential of relationships, and radical imagination in world-building. I’m interested in setting up ways to explore our identity, tethered histories and lineages, and our fantasy as a way to dream and expand. Where we can become rooted in our full selves, in zoomed in partial aspects, and discover new embodiments and physicalities we can tap into. Through dance-theater movement ideas, physicality, text and voice, sound score, and ideas of cinema we will build from our perspectives inside these worlds and also from the outside in frame, scene, and dynamic. Moving through ranging textures, partnering, concepts, and research we will play with how our stories can be told.

IG: @fulloutfarrish