About Me

Felami Burgess is a producer, educator, writer, and creative director.

Her work lives where story meets strategy. Based between New York City, Philadelphia, and Kenya, she helps independent media makers and mission-driven entrepreneurs connect their ideas to audiences through digital content, outreach partnerships, distribution strategy, and brand narrative.

Felami teaches in the Department of Media Studies & Production at Temple University’s Klein College, where she designs and delivers online and hybrid courses in media, production, writing, and journalism. Long before remote work became the default, she was building digital-first learning environments and multimedia content workflows, pairing tenacity with warmth and precision.

Between 2017–2021, Felami founded Creative Direction Media, a global, work-from-anywhere, creative impact company supporting entrepreneurs and creators with strategy, messaging, and audience engagement. Her nonprofit leadership included entrepreneur leadership and development work supporting South African emerging female entrepreneurs through the nonprofit, Business Activator, in the Cape Flats area (the largest township) in Cape Town, South Africa. In film and documentary, she has held producer and strategy roles across projects including Black Card (distributed by HBO) and When the Drum is Beating, which premiered on PBS’ Independent Lens.

Felami’s recent years have also been shaped by a profound caregiving chapter through 2020–2024 as she cared for her mother through Alzheimer’s, an experience that deepened her commitment to meaning, sustainability, and the kind of work that respects the human behind the professional output. She was profiled in The Wall Street Journal in 2022, and she continues to write, make images, and build new work that honors culture, complexity, and creative freedom, which includes picking back up her novel-in-progress.

FROM FELAMI

I’ve lived a few creative lives in one body: performer, producer, professor, entrepreneur, writer. For a long time, I thought I needed to choose one lane and stay there. But my work has always been a braid, not a straight line.

I built my career telling stories and helping others tell theirs. Sometimes that looked like production and distribution, sometimes teaching and curriculum design, sometimes brand strategy and outreach partnerships for entrepreneurs and independent creatives. I love the moment when a message clicks, when an audience finally finds what it didn’t know it needed, when a creator realizes they can build a new system that supports their talent outside and inside of mainstream spaces.

Then life asked something different of me. From 2020 to 2024, I cared for my mother through Alzheimer’s, even moving her to Kenya to live out her final two and a half years on a sunny but sometimes unforgiving coastal hamlet by the beach. Meanwhile, I continued to caregive, teach, and work. In other words, I was forced to be productive in a world that demands constant movement when your body calls out for rest and breath. Caregiving challenges and changes you. And leaves you with little breath at all. But it narrows the noise and clarifies what truly matters. It also made me honest about sustainability, about what I’m willing to trade for achievement, and about the kinds of projects that feel like authentic contribution instead of constant performance.

Today, I’m based between the U.S. and Kenya, building a slower, more intentional creative life. I’m still making things, still teaching, still writing, still photographing, still learning how to honor ambition without sacrificing peace. If you’re here because you care about real stories, fluctuating cultural spaces, and the craft of reaching people with meaning and purpose, you’ve made it to the “right” place.