Kayla Farrish is a Black American Director merging dance theater, filmmaking, narrative, and sound score. Her commissions include Limón Dance Company, Gibney, Louis Armstrong House Museum, Danspace, Little Island, Harlem Stage, BlackLight Summit, and beyond. She creates live works, films, site-specific/immersive performances, and music 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 has Martyr’s Fiction, a film, in edit. Presenting spaces include Lincoln Center, Park Avenue Armory, Symphony Space, and National Sawdust. She has received support from Works & Process, 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 December 8th and NYLA’s Motherboard Suite, and New York Times' Top 2021 Dance Performances for Roster and Breakout Star. She is a recipient of the Harkness Promise Award for 2022. During 2023, she created new works for Arizona State University, LINES Dance Training Program, and the University of Arizona. She has been commissioned to create a reimagined archival work for Limón Dance Company and collaborated with musician Trixie Whitley. In her company project, Put Away the Fire, dear, they tour a narrative group work supported by the New England Foundation for the Arts (NEFA) National Dance Project (NDP) Touring Dance Production Grant. She is also the 2023 recipient of The Watermill Center’s Baroness Nina Von Maltzahn Fellowship and the Ellis-Beauregard Foundation Choreographer Award.