(Source: LinkedIn)
New York-based producer, Cindy Kay Kang, has worked with e.l.f. Cosmetics, Verizon, and the Ad Council, while building a practice in virtual production, a field that is still figuring out what it is.
There is a version of producing that looks like project management with a film degree. Cindy Kay Kang’s version looks different. Before she produced anything, she worked on sets in the camera, grip, lighting, casting, and art departments. By the time she sat at the producer’s table, she already knew what most producers take years to figure out: what each crew member actually needs from you to do their job.
From Photography to the Producer’s Table
Kang’s training began with images. She studied Photography and Imaging at NYU Tisch School of the Arts, picking up a minor in the Business of Entertainment, Media, and Technology along the way.
Before attending NYU, Cindy participated in a summer pre-college program at the Rhode Island School of Design. She then earned her undergraduate degree in Photography and Imaging from NYU Tisch School of the Arts and later completed a graduate program in Strategic Communication at Columbia University.
In between, she built her practical experience. Studio management at NYU Shanghai. Digital marketing works in Beijing. Early visual content production in New York. None of it was a straight line to where she ended up, but that’s not unusual. What those roles gave her was less about the work itself than about how different organizations function: how decisions get made, how information moves through teams, and what breaks down when it doesn’t.
The move into producing came through a connection from her years in photography. A colleague launched WLab, a virtual production studio in New York, and brought her in as an in-house producer. Virtual production, LED volumes, Unreal Engine environments, and camera-synced backgrounds running in real time were not yet standard offerings in commercial work. Some studios were figuring it out. WLab was one of them. Cindy joined early.
Building a Track Record in Virtual Production
At WLab, and later at Madwell/WLab after Madwell’s acquisition in 2025, Kang produced across a fairly wide range of project types: commercials, branded content, music videos. The client list ran from e.l.f. Cosmetics and Verizon to Fernet-Branca, the Ad Council, the CDC, the AMA, and Sony Music.
Among those projects, Make Up Over Makeup is probably the most visible. The e.l.f. branded web series, produced entirely in a virtual production environment, received a Bronze Honor at the Shorty Awards in the Branded Series category. That recognition confirmed that a series built inside an LED volume could hold an audience the same way a conventionally shot production might.
She also produced Peculiar Behavior, an e.l.f. SKIN campaign built around a real-time virtual production workflow, and line-produced Play Defense Against Flu, a national public health campaign from the Ad Council, the CDC, and the AMA. Both made it into industry coverage: Marketing Dive, The Drum, Ads of the World, and iSpot.tv, which is worth noting mostly because public health campaigns and beauty-brand work are not obviously the same job, and she did both.
International Production and Bilingual Coordination
Not all of her work has been domestic. Cindy contributed to Have a Seat, a Taiwanese reality series. She had to coordinate the New York side of the production while staying in communication with the Taiwan-based team. Cross-border productions have unique problems, such as differences in how crews expect to communicate, what clients expect from a production timeline, and how much ambiguity is acceptable at different stages. Kang managed it all, in English and Mandarin.
For her, being bilingual affects how she communicates with talent, how she reads the room when part of it is operating in a different language, and occasionally how she thinks about what a project is actually for and who it is going to reach.
The Producing Philosophy Behind the Work
Kang talks about producing in terms of honesty more than strategy. Her working principle, stated plainly and applied consistently, is that productions break down when people aren’t being straight with each other. Clients get told a method can do something it can’t. The crew doesn’t know what the creative goal actually is. Departments are working off different assumptions, and nobody wants to be the one to say so.
She applies this specifically to virtual production, which she is neither evangelical about nor dismissive of. For the right project, an LED volume stage is genuinely useful. For a smaller production without the prep time, budget, or technical crew to use it well, it is an expensive way to get a worse result than you would have gotten shooting somewhere real. The judgment call is the job.
She says much the same thing about AI tools. The question she asks is whether the technology improves the work, protects the contributions of the people doing it, and produces something an audience will actually respond to. If the answer is yes, she’s interested. If it’s not clear, she waits. It is not a particularly exciting position, but it seems to produce good results.
Current Focus and Future Direction
Kang is currently freelancing across commercial, branded, short-form, and narrative projects. She is looking for work that lets her bring together the parts of her practice that don’t always show up in the same job: traditional production experience, virtual production fluency, bilingual coordination work, and the brand storytelling background. She is interested in international projects and in work that could travel to major festivals.
Her career to this point has been a series of useful lateral moves. Set work, then produce. Photography school, then communication strategy. Moving between countries. The coherence is not obvious from the outside, but from inside the producing room, it adds up.
Follow Cindy Kay Kang on LinkedIn, Instagram, or IMDB.
About Us
Edward Hale is a freelance journalist who focuses on financial journalism. He also writes about the creative industries.
