ATLANTA — Gifted young filmmaker Kaylee Jade Warfield is building her own creative legacy in Atlanta as a writer, director, visual artist and actress, bringing stories to life across film, theater and television.
Warfield’s creative foundation was shaped by growing up in Alpharetta, Georgia, surrounded by art, culture and Atlanta’s entertainment industry. Her father, DL Warfield, is an iconic creative director and fine artist whose work in Atlanta’s entertainment industry exposed Kaylee to the creative world from an early age.
“He was a major part of Atlanta’s entertainment sector, especially the music scene because a lot of his job was to creative direct the album covers for major artists,” Warfield said.
That early exposure helped shape the way Warfield viewed creativity and storytelling.
“My childhood, even though my parents didn’t really embed me with understanding the background of who I was, they embedded me with culture and love and art,” she said.
Her parents’ passion for movies also played a major role in developing her imagination.
“My parents are big movie fans, like we used to go to the theater at midnight on Thursdays to go watch a new movie coming out on Friday,” Warfield said. “Any of like when Marvel got its start, Iron Man, Avatar, King Kong. I remember crying in a theater on a Thursday night and my dad was like, ‘Why are you crying?’ I’m like, ‘Because I loved King Kong.’”
Those experiences helped shape her love for storytelling.
“All of my love and passion for storytelling came from all of those movies that we went to as a child and then, using storytelling as a survival mechanism, or as a survival tool to tell stories and create worlds for myself and play characters,” Warfield said.
Warfield said she has always been able to visualize stories before they exist.
“I’ve always seen everything as a story,” she said. “I’ve always seen everything as something that could go on screen or on stage. I see the story and I feel like there’s a set that I see, I see it being on a set and I see the blocking. It’s just very easy for me to envision the story and like actually execute and direct the story.”
That creativity appeared early in her childhood. Warfield spent years creating performances with friends, recording videos and directing homemade productions.
“I used to put on so many skits as a kid,” Warfield said. “The staircase in the house that I grew up in, that’s where I would put on my performance. I was either performing Beyoncé and walking down the stairs and then I’d have my friends over and we’d put on a whole show and I was directing them and telling them how to move and groove, or using my tiny little camcorder to record it and then edit it on my computer.”
During middle school, Warfield began using video as another form of storytelling.
“In middle school is when I picked up a camera and started recording myself,” she said. “I would sometimes try to challenge my teachers and say, ‘Hey, instead of writing this paper, can I do a video instead and talk about whatever the assignment is through a video and a skit?’”
Her passion for directing continued into high school when she co-wrote and directed a competitive play called “Snap.”
“I think that was when I got my directing bug,” Warfield said. “I had never seen my own work go on stage like that before.”
Warfield continued her artistic training at Georgia College & State University in Milledgeville, where she studied theater and directed productions including Dominique Morisseau’s “Blood at the Root.”
“I literally had written out all the blocking prior to all the rehearsals because I had such a strong vision,” Warfield said.
During college, Warfield created her first short film, “Black Girl Magic,” an experimental project adapted from one of her poems.
“My dad, he would never let that fire go out,” Warfield said. “He just kept saying to me, ‘You’ve got to make something. You got to show something. Why don’t you do Black Girl Magic or why don’t you take one of your poems and make it a visual or why don’t you write a little script and a story.’”
After graduating, Warfield spent five years working behind the scenes on film sets, gaining experience while continuing to pursue her own creative goals.
“Once I graduated college, I immediately immersed myself into the film world, working on set,” she said. “But a lot of that set life, it is so brutal and working those long hours. When you are working below the line and you’re working behind the camera and you’re doing all the logistical things, you just lose touch with why you wanted to get into it in the first place.”
That experience pushed Warfield to create work that showcased her abilities as a filmmaker.
“After doing that for five years, I hadn’t created anything to show that I’m not just like a production assistant,” Warfield said. “I’m a creative and I am a director and I’m a writer. So finally, after four years in the making of Wake Up, I was able to finish that and do my premiere.”
Her latest project, “Wake Up,” is a 10-minute experimental short film adapted from her poem “Fear is a Lie” and her college stage play “Wake Up: A Stream of Consciousness.”
The film follows an actress navigating the balance between her dreams and reality while confronting a fear of failure.
“It’s about an actress who is trying to overcome her fear of failure and we follow her as she is navigating and trying to find balance between her dreams and her reality,” Warfield said. “I really wanted the film to be colorful and theatrical and poetic and metaphorical.”
Warfield said one of the film’s central messages comes from a line in the script.
“The best line in the script is: ‘What if all your fears are just affirmations that your dreams can be real?’” she said. “Because if you are so fearful of something, there’s a really good chance you’re fearful because it’s absolutely what you should be doing. It’s absolutely your purpose. It’s your God-given talent.”
Creating the project required Warfield to take on multiple roles, including writer, director and lead actress.
“The craziest part about wearing all those hats was Murphy’s Law and how there were so many things that happened where things fell through the cracks and made the process really difficult,” Warfield said. “More things went wrong than went right, honestly. However, by wearing all those hats, I had no choice but to continue moving forward.”
Warfield said she was especially proud of the women who helped bring the project to life.
“One of the best parts about my film was all of the women that worked on it,” she said. “The majority of the set was women and that is something that was very, very important to me. I think that’s something I’ll try to keep as my thing where I constantly have a woman-made set.”
“Wake Up” premiered at The Plaza Theatre in Atlanta and is now entering the festival submission process.
Warfield is also developing several future projects across film and television, continuing to create stories centered around identity, culture and personal experiences.
Warfield credits her father’s discipline and creativity as one of her biggest inspirations.
“The greatest thing my dad has ever taught me is to create and execute, create and execute, and then create and execute again,” she said.
Her ultimate goal is to inspire others through her work.
“That was what I wanted most of all was to inspire people because I certainly think that if I could do it, I know everybody else can do it,” Warfield said. “I just want people to walk away inspired. There is so much opportunity for people to live out their dreams and actually bring them to fruition.”