About Kayla

Born in Sheepshead Bay and raised in central New Jersey, Kayla has been obsessed with playing pretend since age nine. Her first official stage appearance was as Wendy Darling in her summer camp’s production of Peter Pan - she peed her nightgown onstage in front of her friends and their families. The first official lie she ever told was that she did not, in fact, pee her nightgown onstage in front of her friends and their families, despite what you may have heard.

Needless to say, her career as a storyteller could only go up from there. Kayla attended New York University’s Tisch School of the Arts, where she studied acting, playwriting, devising, and directing at Playwrights Horizons Theater School, and Shakespeare while abroad in London at the Royal Academy of Dramatic Art. At RADA, she was fortunate enough to conquer such roles as Paulina in The Winter’s Tale, Lady Anne in Richard III, and Tamora in Titus Andronicus.

Kayla co-created and starred in The WorkOut!, an immersive theatrical fitness farce, which she then helped adapt as a short film, The WorkOut Video!. Soon after, Kayla worked alongside Clubbed Thumb, Sarah DeLappe, and Lila Neugebauer performing as #8 in original workshops of The Wolves. Her acting work continued at the Alabama Shakespeare Festival in productions of The Comedy of Errors, A Christmas Carol, Cinderella, A Midsummer Night's Dream, and Disney’s Beauty and the Beast. She also had the honor of originating the lead in the world premiere of Lucille Lichtblau’s Starstruck at the Southern Writers' Project.

Back in New York, Kayla played Ophelia in Hamlet at the Brick Theater, was featured in Ian Owes U!, a series pilot that premiered at the New York Television Festival, did voiceover for the feature documentary The Bachelors of Broken Hill Farms, and shot a commercial for A&E, to name a few projects. She also studied comedy at the Upright Citizens’ Brigade Theater and has since been performing and producing long-form improv, sketch, and character comedy at venues throughout the five boroughs.

Kayla self-produced developmental workshops of her full-length play, Lilith in Pisces, at Dixon Place and the Hudson Guild Theater. The play was nominated for Best Play at the New York Theater Festival Awards. Lilith in Pisces has since been showcased at Relative Theatrics’ New Voices Festival and the Kennedy Center’s American College Theater Festival. The play will receive its world premiere production at The Flea as part of Drops in the Vase’s inaugural season in March 2025.

As a writer and producer, Kayla has developed numerous projects, from ideation to distribution. At the Alabama Shakespeare Festival, she co-produced, co-wrote, and starred in monthly cabarets, as well as the world-premiere reading of A Star Wars Christmas Carol, a crossover satire of the popular film franchise and Dickens novel. Stuck at home in 2020, she created the short-form series Zeitgrandma! and One-minute Mocs for Rizzle Studios, wrote episodes for the YouTube web series Zooming In, and produced Doll Brawl, a socially-distanced, improvised short film.

Kayla’s pilot script, Delta Dawn, was a quarterfinalist at the Austin Film Festival, and her feature script, Yiddish Club, was a quarterfinalist at the Big Apple Film Festival. Her short film script, The Clares, was featured on Coverfly’s Red List. Currently, she is developing a comedic solo show, Woman in a Leadership Role, as well as a feature film script which pays homage to the New Jersey turnpike.

In 2024, among a few other less important things, Kayla received her MFA in Writing for TV and Film at Emerson College and got married to a dude named Michael, who shares her passion for Shakespeare, goofy sense of humor, and cozy Brooklyn apartment.