About Me

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

Felami’s work lives where story meets strategy, merging the magical, clarifying spaces in-between. Based between New York, Philadelphia, and Kenya, Felami has spent 12+ years moving fluidly between disciplines that most people treat as separate careers — film production, brand strategy, higher education, and entrepreneurial development — helping independent media makers and mission-driven entrepreneurs connect their ideas to audiences through digital content, outreach partnerships, distribution strategy, and brand narrative.

She teaches in the Department of Media Studies & Production at Temple University's Klein College, designing and delivering courses in media, production, writing, and journalism. Long before remote learning became an industry standard, she had already built the digital-first infrastructure to handle it — online courses, digital workflows, and e-learning environments that were built to outlast the urgency of the moment for which they were designed.

As the founder of Creative Direction Media (2017-2021), she built a global creative consultancy from the ground up — no inherited client base, no outside investment — supporting independent creatives and entrepreneurs across the United States, Africa, and Europe. Her nonprofit work included entrepreneurial leadership and development programming for emerging Black female entrepreneurs through the nonprofit, Business Activator, in Cape Flats, Cape Town's largest township. Her producing credits span HBO, PBS Independent Lens, and the Sundance Lab New Frontier. In 2022, her C-Suite career pivot was featured in The Wall Street Journal.

Felami's recent years have also been shaped by a profound caregiving chapter. From 2015 to 2024, she cared for her mother through late-onset Alzheimer's, an experience that became heightened by the COVID pandemic. It deepened her commitment to meaning, human sustainability, and the kind of work that respects the person, not just the output. That chapter did not pause her career. It clarified it — narrowing the noise, sharpening the questions, and deepening commitment to work that respects the entirety of the individual.

She is still writing. Still making images. Still teaching. Still building. This time, more slowly, more intentionally, and with a keener sense of what we are building toward — work that honors the vastness of cultures, individual complexities, and our own creative freedoms.

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 beautiful braid, not a fixed straight line.

I have built a 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 they didn’t know they needed, when a creator realizes they can build a new system that supports talent outside and inside of mainstream spaces.

Then life asked something different of me. From 2015 to 2024, I cared for my mother through Alzheimer’s, moving her to Kenya in August of 2021 to live out her final two and a half years on a sunny but sometimes unforgiving coastal hamlet by the Indian Ocean. 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. It 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 pressure and performance.

Today, I’m based between 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 genuine stories, fluctuating cultural spaces, and the craft of reaching people with meaning and purpose. Then you've arrived exactly where this was meant to land.