April, 2026.- In the 2026 creative ecosystem, few testimonies are as powerful as KEZIAI’s. After establishing herself as a live-action director for giants like Mastercard and HSBC, a chronic illness took her away from traditional sets but opened the door to a new dimension: AI Cinema. For KEZIAI, Artificial Intelligence is not an automation tool but a “creative accelerator” and a collaborator in a constant dialogue. Her approach, termed “Intentional AI,” brings the meticulousness of framing, narrative, and mise-en-scène from classic cinema to an environment where the only limit is the ability to dream. Rejoining Honor Society, she returns not as a technician, but as a visionary using technology to make the invisible visible, taking intimate themes like pain and isolation to public spaces as prominent as the Saatchi Gallery or Times Square.

In this exclusive conversation with Roastbrief, KEZIAI explores what it means to direct a medium still inventing its own language — and how her Intermedia background made it inevitable. She explains that just as early film began by mimicking theater, today’s AI is moving past mimicking cinema to become something radically new: a camera for the not-yet-imagined. Through series like Deserted Realities, the artist proves that the distance between feeling and form has collapsed, allowing works to travel the world while the body rests. Discover how this pioneer is merging the rigor of traditional filmmaking with the infinite possibilities of AI to shape the future of commercial and artistic storytelling, reminding us that, ultimately, what remains is human intent.

1. “AI Saved My Life”: You’ve said that AI saved your life after chronic illness altered your path as a live-action director. How did discovering AI change not just your creative practice but your sense of possibility as an artist? What did it unlock that you thought you’d lost?

I was travelling around the world directing commercials when chronic illness took traditional production away — crews, locations, the whole physical reality of a film set. That life stopped. Discovering AI in mid-2022, I instantly felt the potential and freedom to create directly from the imagination. It removes the barrier between idea and image — allowing impossible shots from your dreams. AI enabled me to create again: the joy. What a time to be alive!  

2. From Live-Action to the Imagination Age: You’ve transitioned from directing live-action commercials for brands like HSBC, Mastercard, and Cadbury to working at the intersection of art and AI. How does your background in traditional filmmaking—storytelling, performance, craft—inform your approach to AI cinema? What do you bring that someone who started with AI might not?

Studying Intermedia at art school in the 90s, directing commercials, photography and the zing of the zeitgeist; it all converged for me in AI. Intermedia was about the spaces between art forms — not quite belonging to any single medium. That’s still where I work. AI doesn’t resolve that instability; it radicalises it.

Everything I’ve done has been preparation for a medium that didn’t exist yet.

I bring from traditional filmmaking a love of the craft and a deep understanding of film language: storytelling, performance, concept, visual imagination and technical curiosity. I think of my approach as AI cinema: directing with the same intentionality and instinct I’d bring to a live-action set — emotional arc, pacing, and mise en scène. Not generating images, directing them. My interest spans film, installation, still image, sound and interactive — AI cinema is the through-line, not the boundary. You start with the feeling or the idea and the work tells you what it wants to be.

It began as a means of translating lived experience into image and developed into a practice where the distance between feeling and form collapses. Still human.

3. Intentional AI: You describe your work as “intentional AI” and approach AI as “a pseudo film set, a creative accelerator, a collaborator.” How do you maintain creative intent and narrative control when working with a tool that can generate infinite variations? Where does the artist’s hand remain?

If anything is possible, it becomes about the idea, the meaning. What makes it matter? Intentional AI is honing the infinite possibilities with creative intent — not generating endlessly, but matching technique with concept. Using bespoke parameters, workflows and evolving prompts to create something that didn’t exist before.

Working with AI also means leaning into what it does well and embracing the unexpected: like jazz, you respond to what emerges. Grab the great moments and happy accidents. It’s a dialogue. AI has its own nature. It’s a medium — like film, like paint. AI changes how you think about possibility. I keep the human in the technological. 

The artist’s hand feels more present, not less, because the logistics between concept and execution fall away. You don’t disappear into the machine; you structure the entire encounter with it. What remains is intent, vision, curation: directing. As Claire Silver says, “Taste is the new skill.” It goes deeper than taste. Taste selects. Intent directs.

Intentional AI is directing methodology for a set that exists in latent space.

4. Cinematic Direction for the Imagination Age: Your work has been described as “cinematic direction for the Imagination Age”— shots that can’t be physically captured, worlds that don’t yet exist. What does that mean for the future of commercial storytelling? How do you see AI cinema evolving in advertising?

I approach AI with both technical aptitude and narrative intent, bringing the unimaginable to life. Shots that can’t be physically captured. Worlds that don’t exist. A camera for the not-yet imagined. Cinematic direction for the Imagination Age. Building worlds that feel inhabited.

For commercial storytelling, everything changes. Collaborating early, tying idea directly to possibility — with emotion and narrative at the centre. Technique and concept developed together, not sequentially. Film, gaming, immersive worlds and interactivity are converging. The line between watching and inhabiting a story is dissolving.

When film was invented, people pointed the camera at the stage  — because they didn’t yet understand the language of cinema. Now we point AI at film for the same reason. Every new medium begins by mimicking the last. Early film copied theatre. Early AI copies cinema. If the mechanical age let us reproduce the world, the AI age lets us reimagine it. We’re inventing a new language.

Photography captured light.
Cinema captured movement.
AI captures imagination.

— KEZIAI

5. The Deserted Realities Series: Your ‘Deserted Realities’ series, exhibited at the Saatchi Gallery, transforms personal narratives into dystopian future landscapes exploring isolation, pain, and resilience. How does your personal experience inform your creative work, and what is it like to have such intimate themes exhibited in major galleries and even in the stratosphere?

Showing intimate themes in public is pretty wild. My ‘Deserted Realities’ series — exhibited at PIVOTAL: Digitalism at the Saatchi Gallery in 2024, curated by Rebekah Tolley-Georgiou, reaching over 13,000 visitors — transforms personal narratives into metaphorical dystopian future landscapes. Works like ‘It’s the End of the World’ and ‘Everything’s on Fire but it’s Fine’ sit in that space between catastrophe and defiance, pain and humour. Apocalyptic and tender simultaneously. I made it all from bed. My work travels for me — from London to New York to the stratosphere.

Created during a period of illness when traditional production was impossible. AI as a means of translating lived feeling directly into moving image. An affect-led use of the technology oriented toward sensation, emotion, and lived experience. Where unstable bodies meet technology, with intimacy and human gesture remaining central.

One of my works, exploring the surreal experience of delirium, was exhibited on an art van with a large screen, driven around Times Square, presented by ArtBeesGallery. A deeply interior experience made visible in one of the most overstimulating public spaces on earth.

I’m intrigued by making the unseen seen, which is what AI itself does: images diffused from noise, latent, revealed through intent. Without intent, it stays noise. My work does the same thing with chronic illness — makes visible what society doesn’t see. Sometimes the medium itself becomes the subject.

Putting deeply personal work in public feels anarchic and cathartic. I wanted to make something people couldn’t look away from.

6. Returning to Honor Society: You’re rejoining Honor Society after your evolution into AI. What does it mean to be back with Megan Kelly and the team, and what kind of work are you most excited to make together at this intersection of art, technology, and film?

I love Megan and Honor Society’s approach to filmmaking in advertising — and their culture: intelligent, kind, no assholes. Brave about the work. I bring concept, narrative, visual, sonic and technical execution together — directing, hands-on, with an appetite for evolving technology. Not AI as a gimmick or a cost-saving measure, but as a genuinely new medium. I’m excited to bring the language of AI cinema to the commercial world.

I’m thrilled to be back.