Join us for an evening with interdisciplinary artist Kayla Farrish at BANDALOOP Studios in West Oakland.

On May 23, Kayla will present The Camera as Portal and Witness, a one-night-only screening-lecture featuring excerpts from her film work alongside reflections on her creative process and influences. The evening invites audiences into dialogue, with time for conversation and questions. Dinner catered by Aburaya is included with your RSVP.

Prior to the screening-lecture, the Gatherings team will host Kayla for the movement workshop "World-Building, Imagination, and Voice-Building: Working with Dance-Theater and Humanism to Create Possibility".

Schedule

3:45–5:15 PM — GATHERINGS Movement Workshop (Studio West), register here for this workshop

5:30–7:00 PM — Dinner + Screening-Lecture (Studio East)

VENUE ACCESSIBILITY

Both Studios East and West, along with BANDALOOP Studios’s bathrooms are ADA Accessible.

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ABOUT THE ARTIST

Kayla Farrish is a Black American Director merging dance-theater, filmmaking, narrative, and sound score. Her commissions include Limon Dance Company, Whim’ Whim, Ririe Woodbury,  Louis Armstrong House Museum, Danspace, Little Island, Harlem Stage, and beyond. She creates live works, films, site-specific/immersive works, and collaborations. 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, and Inside the Laughing Barrel and Martyr’s Fiction films. Presenting spaces include Chelsea Factory, American Dance Festival, Guggenheim Works & Process, Lincoln Center, Symphony Space, National Sawdust, among receiving support from Watermill Center, Armstrong Now!, Brooklyn Filmmakers Collective, Baryshnikov Arts Center, La Mama, and others. She collaborates with musicians Esperanza Spalding, Moor Mother, and Trixie Whitley, and also creates work in film and theater. 

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 2022 Harkness Promise Award. She is a 2023 NEFA NDP Grantee, 2023 recipient of Watermill Center Nina Von Maltzahn Fellowship, and the recipient of the Ellis Beauregard Foundation Choreographer Award. She is a 2025 CUNY Dance Initiative Artist, NYFA/NYSCA Choreography Fellow, 2026 NY Support for Artists Grantee, and Danse Mirage Foundation Choreography commissioned artist. She loves bridging the unconventional bringing mediums in dialogue with one another to collage together invisibilized, urgent, and visceral stories.

Photo courtesy of the artist.