RESIDENT ARTISTS
Kayla Farrish
Project being workshopped at Chelsea Factory:
Put Away the Fire, dear (Expansion, Short Film, and Performances)
Jumping portals and seams spanning reality and cinema, Put Away the Fire, dear, uproots power and history across generations of the American landscape, rupturing “The Master Narrative” to dismantle American Cinema of the 1930s-60s.
About Kayla Farrish:
Kayla Farrish is a Black American Director merging dance, theater, filmmaking, narrative, and sound score. Her commissions include Limon Dance Company, Gibney, Louis Armstrong House Museum, Danspace, Pepatian, Little Island, Harlem Stage, Blacklight Summit and beyond. Some works include: Black Bodies Sonata, The New Frontier: My dear America, Inside the Laughing Barrel, and Martyr’s Fiction. In 2021-2022, 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. She’s been presented by Lincoln Center, Symphony Space, and Guggenheim Works & Process; additionally held residencies with Brooklyn Filmmakers Collective, Baryshnikov Arts Center, La Mama 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. In 2023-24, she created a new work for Limon Dance Company, received the NEFA NDP Grant, Watermill Center Nina Von Maltzahn Fellowship, and the Ellis Beauregard Foundation Contemporary Dance Award.
Photo of ‘Put Away the Fire, dear’ by Ben McKeown © ADF 2024