Julia Kisla Taylor Knows Who Should Be in the Room

Julia Kisla Taylor has described a workplace arrangement that would disappoint a dealer in executive furniture. At The Lions, she sits at a communal table with the agents. The CEO has put herself within conversational distance of the people negotiating the next opportunity. An office door would rather spoil the arrangement.

There is a useful clue to her career in that choice. Taylor works in an industry organized around access: to a casting, a campaign, a designer, an audience. Her own route has crossed countries and professions. Again and again, the work brings someone with creative ability into contact with someone who can help that ability travel.

Start with the table, then follow the introductions. They lead from a Ukrainian upbringing to American creative businesses; from a New York agency to a couture presentation; from an evening in Manhattan to the commercial prospects of women artisans in Guatemala. The settings change. The question of who gets to participate keeps returning.

A departure from Poltava

Taylor grew up in Poltava, Ukraine. She was a high-school student when the Soviet Union collapsed in 1991 and Ukraine became independent. At 19, she left for college in the United States. Independence was part of her adolescence before it became something she would discuss from the other side of the Atlantic.

By March 2022, she was living in Cold Spring, New York, with her mother. Other family members remained in Ukraine, in the region between Kyiv and Kharkiv. During the opening days of Russia’s full-scale invasion, she described the experience of waiting for family to answer the telephone. Distance had acquired a cruel new unit of measurement: the interval between calls.

That history gives her later work with Ukrainian designers a particular context. A fashion presentation can introduce a country through the people making things there. Designers arrive with collections, techniques and commercial ambitions. Their work gives an audience something specific to encounter, beyond a place name in a headline.

The accountant among the artists

Her professional route began with an interest in language. She came to America on a scholarship in creative writing and literature, then earned a master’s degree in accounting at Suffolk University. The combination has an appealing practicality. A creative business needs someone to understand both the work and the machinery that keeps the work going.

In 2010, Taylor was listed as CFO and COO of Nice Shoes, the visual-effects, design and color-grading company. Its artists had worked on the video for Kanye West’s “Power,” directed by Marco Brambilla. The production brought together visual effects, three-dimensional work and color grading. Taylor’s role belonged to the business supporting that activity.

A credits list usually directs attention to the people making the images. A company description reveals another part of the picture: the executives responsible for the organization around them. Her career also included music publishing. Fashion would give her another setting in which creative work and commercial decisions needed to coexist.

The business of being a person

The Lions emerged in 2014 as a New York modeling agency, with Taylor as CEO. Ali Kavoussi, Louie Chaban and Christiana Tran were among the managing partners associated with its early leadership. The company developed services in branding, public relations and creative work alongside representation. A booking became part of a larger conversation about a career.

Taylor has explained that the agency wants to preserve a boutique approach while expanding the services it offers. That ambition requires knowing what an individual wants to do over time. A model may have an audience, interests and ambitions that extend beyond the next photograph. An agency can help connect those different parts of a working life.

Her recollection of Instagram’s early reception supplies a small comedy of professional etiquette. Casting directors once worried that models were revealing too much online and asked the agency to encourage more mystery. The industry had spent years selling faces; the people attached to them had begun speaking for themselves. The advice to remain elusive aged rather quickly.

In her account of the agency’s future, technology brings opportunities as well as difficult questions. She has discussed digital tools, personal branding and creative participation for models. The recurring concern is how a person can maintain a meaningful role as the methods of producing and distributing images change.

A network with somewhere to go

At Fashinnovation’s eighth Worldwide Talks in February 2023, Taylor moderated a discussion with Anne V., Coco Rocha and Natane Boudreau. Its subject was freedom and finding a voice within modeling. A panel is a modest format, but it does give the people doing the work space to articulate what the work feels like.

That April, a partnership between The Lions and Fashinnovation was announced, connecting talent management with a platform focused on fashion, technology and sustainability. The proposed activities included events and reports. Taylor’s stated interest was in getting participants in the industry together to develop practical responses to shared problems.

There was an earlier, livelier illustration in June 2019. The Lions held a World Oceans Day benefit at Spring Place for Whale and Dolphin Conservation. Taylor said the team contacted more than 100 companies. The evening included music, pop-ups and whale adoptions. Fashion’s address book had been given an assignment, and the assignment involved whales.

Ukrainian couture gets an introduction

On September 8, 2024, FROLOV presented “Ivasyk” at Academy Mansion during New York Fashion Week. The Lions was the general partner for the Ukrainian designer’s New York introduction. Taylor described a connection made through the founder of Ukrainian Fashion Week. An introduction became a collaboration, then a public presentation.

The agency’s talent in the presentation included Danielle Zinaich, Lameka Fox and Ukrainian model Tanya Kizko. The Fashionography produced the event. Those details show the range of work behind a fashion-week moment: representation, production and local relationships all had a part. The finished collection needed a working arrangement around it.

The event also offered a way to support Ukrainian cultural preservation. Sales proceeds from the FROLOVHEART charity collection and donations were directed toward The Ukrainian Museum’s SAFE program, supporting art projects and the rescue of endangered artworks. The commercial and cultural parts of the evening had a concrete connection.

In June 2025, Taylor introduced designs by J’Amemme and Paskal at Fashion 4 Development’s Ambassador Summer Circle at The Pierre. The gathering brought Ukrainian eveningwear into a setting of diplomats and cultural representatives. Her work was again at the point of introduction: giving a new audience a reason to pay attention to particular designers.

A later Rock Projects showcase at Luisa Via Roma’s New York flagship carried that conversation into a shop. It featured three women-led brands: J’Amemme, Khrystyna Rachytska and SOLO for Diamonds. Taylor was listed with Rock Projects founder Anya Vasylenko as co-host for a second evening planned for November 20, 2025. The installation included a shoppable selection, giving visitors the possibility of becoming customers.

The change of setting is revealing. A diplomatic gathering offers an occasion to introduce the work. A retail presentation puts it among things people can buy. These are different kinds of access, with different demands on a designer. Bringing the same creative community into both settings makes the connection between cultural recognition and commercial opportunity easier to see. The clothes have somewhere to go after the applause.

What the gala photograph leaves outside the frame

On March 6, 2025, Mercado Global honored Taylor at its Fashion Forward Gala at Tribeca 360°. Fernando García of Oscar de la Renta and Madeleine Sinclair of Blue Owl Capital were also honorees. The evening brought together fashion, finance and philanthropy, with models from The Lions among those attending.

Mercado Global connects Indigenous women artisans with business training and international markets. Its advisory-board listings include Taylor. Behind the photographs and dinner program is an economic question: how does someone with craft skills gain access to customers, business knowledge and the relationships required to sell their work?

“Fashion is one of the most powerful storytelling tools we have.”

Julia Kisla Taylor

She had worked on related questions elsewhere. Under the Clinton-Bush Haiti Fund, she created a small-business recovery program for Haiti’s retail sector. She also implemented an economic-empowerment trade program for women in Rwanda under a UN Women initiative. These projects place financial expertise alongside creative work and access to markets.

Her Mercado Global involvement continued into the next year. In January 2026, the organization named Taylor and Maribel Lieberman as co-chairs in its Financial Empowerment Gala announcement. The sequence matters: an honoree returned in an organizing role. Recognition was one point in a continuing relationship.

After the introduction

Taylor has drawn attention to the gap between women’s visibility in fashion and their authority within it. Her argument asks who gets a voice in decisions, beyond appearing in the finished image. It is an especially pointed question in a business where being seen can look so much like having power.

In September 2026, she attended Fashion 4 Development’s First Ladies Luncheon at The Pierre with designer Michelle Ochs. Her role as its Global Ambassador for Cultural Diplomacy extends the pattern of her work into another setting. A fashion executive, a designer and a diplomatic gathering belong to the same professional itinerary.

The route back to that communal table is fairly short. Representation, at its most practical, involves proximity: listening closely enough to understand someone’s plans, then knowing whom to call. Taylor’s career has supplied several kinds of expertise and several kinds of room. What gives the story its continuity is the work of getting other people into them.