Embedded Files
Photo by Stephanie Crousillat
Kayla Farrish (she/her) is a Black American director merging dance-theater, filmmaking, narrative, and sound. Her work explores identity, the dualities of history and present survival, and the liberatory power of dreaming.
Her commissions include Limón Dance Company, Gibney, Danspace, Harlem Stage, Little Island, Louis Armstrong House Museum, and more. She has created live works, films, immersive/site-specific projects, and collaborations including Black Bodies Sonata, The New Frontier: My dear America, Sunny Side/Inside the Laughing Barrel, December 8th, Roster with Melanie Charles, MIXTAPES with Alex MacKinnon, Broken Record with Brandon Coleman, and the films Rinsing and Harbor. Her work has been presented at Lincoln Center, Park Avenue Armory, Symphony Space, and National Sawdust, with support from Watermill Center, Brooklyn Filmmakers Collective, La MaMa, and others.
A New York Times “Breakout Star” in 2021, Farrish is a 2025 NYFA/ NYSCA Artist Fellow in Choreography, the recipient of two Bessie Awards, a NEFA National Dance Project grant, Sundance Uprise Grant for Emerging BIPOC Directors, a Harkness Promise Award, and fellowships from the Watermill Center and the Ellis Beauregard Foundation. She has also served as rehearsal director for Sleep No More and as adjunct faculty at NYU Tisch Dance.
Works Available to Tour
Put Away the Fire, dear
Put Away the Fire, dear
*NDP Touring Subsidies Available (through 2027)
Premiere: March 2025, Chelsea Factory, NYC
Traveling cast & crew: 10 (7 performers, 3 crew)
Put Away the Fire, dear is a live dance-theater work following six BIPOC and marginalized characters who reclaim their own narratives. Inspired by Toni Morrison’s idea of “The Master Narrative”, and using Old Hollywood plot frameworks, the piece disrupts oppressive tropes and leaps between fiction and reality to fill missing storylines, and imagine new narratives of humanity and power. The work features a live music score drawn from reclaimed Black American music.
Runtime: approximately 100 minutes, with one intermission
Photos by Elyse Mertz
DOCILE
DOCILE
Premiere: September 2025, International Dance Festival, New Orleans, LA (in progress)
Touring Cast: 1 performer, 1-2 crew
Lighting Design and World Builder: Tuce Yasak
DOCILE is a solo performance merging dance, physical theater, script, set and lighting design, and a raging sound score. Turning toward darkness, resistance, and invisibility colliding with freedom, it witnesses a Black woman releasing the interior weight of navigating power. Inspired by James Baldwin’s Notes of a Native Son, it reflects on the tension between exile and return, and the pursuit of truth within struggle. Through wild movement, text, and voice drawn from the Diaspora, she journeys through vulnerability and transformation, inviting the audience to confront the edges of truth and the bravery of claiming full humanity.
Photos by Elyse Mertz
A Beast (duet version)
A Beast (duet version)
A Beast That Came Apart Mid-Air (group version)
A Beast That Came Apart Mid-Air (group version)
In development; touring from summer 2026
Touring Cast: 2 performers, 1-2 crew (duet version); 3-6 performers, 2 crew (group version)
Lighting Design and World Builder: Tuce Yasak
Writing and Documentation collaborator: Alex Diaz
Dramaturg: Jamal Abrams
A Beast imagines our untethering from power systems. As those systems come apart, what power and dismantling do we hold in our own voices? As truths are unsuppressed, the duet/group hold one another in confrontation and intimate conversation. Moving through dialogue, truth-telling, poetry, and release, they expand their capacity to feel risk and uncover the personal power within.
Photos by Elyse Mertz
Touring History
American Dance Festival, The Clarice Smith Performing Arts Center at University of Maryland, ODC (Seattle, WA), Portland Ovations (Portland, ME), Works & Process at the Guggenheim, Kaatsbaan, La MaMa Experimental Theatre, International Dance Festival New Orleans, Watermill Center, Chelsea Factory
Press
...a jazz improvisation drawing out the riches from the depths of our souls.
Darvejon A. Jones, CULTUREBOT (January 2023)
[...] the dancer and choreographer Kayla Farrish teamed up with the musician Melanie Charles [...]. The mesmerizing result transformed these five distinct dancers — moving with silken speed or as slow-motion sculptures — into a vibrant union of musicality, tenderness and power.
New York Times: Best of Dance 2021
New York Times: The Breakout Stars of 2021
Kayla Farrish’s Latest Was Inspired by Lost José Limón Works
Candice Thompson, Dance Magazine November 4, 2024
Kayla Farrish Brings Her Versatile Company to ODC
Aimée Ts'ao, Classical Voice SF February 23, 2024.
Kayla Farrish “Put Away the Fire, dear pt.2” (in development) at La MaMa Moves
Maura Nguyễn Donohue, CULTUREBOT May 27, 2023
Reframing American Cinema
Cecilia Whalen, Fjord April 23, 2023
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