Kayla Mahaffey is a Chicago-based contemporary fine artist, painter, and illustrator born and raised on the city's South Side. She studied at the American Academy of Art in downtown Chicago before leaving in 2017 to pursue art full-time. Her style blends flat, cartoon elements with brilliant photorealism in a mixture of Pop Art and Afro-Surrealism, creating bright and colorful works that give voice to the unheard stories of contemporary youth. Mahaffey now almost exclusively paints children, exploring themes of identity, nostalgia, and social topics through a lens of whimsy and hope. She is represented by Line Dot Editions and Vertical Gallery in Chicago, and Thinkspace Gallery in California.