Meet Leah Barylsky, the Woman Behind the Camera – And On the Stage — During Rüfüs Du Sol’s Record-Breaking Tour

If you saw Rüfüs Du Sol‘s recent Inhale/Exhale world tour — which sold an incredible 1.7 million tickets, according to Billboard Boxscore — you likely noticed a fourth person onstage giving their own impressive performance.

That was Leah Barylsky, Rüfüs’ camerawoman. Moving with such incredible grace and stamina that fans started filming videos of her filming the performance, Barylsky was crucial to creating the show’s visual feel, pace and intimacy as she, with her camera, got up close to the group’s Tyrone Lindqvist, James Hunt and Jon George.

“It’s my perspective, and what fan doesn’t want to be up there and have the opportunity to see through my lens?” she says.

Of course, roving camera people are a feature of most major tours. But Barylsky’s work is differentiated by how close she gets to each member of the band, in moments filming just inches from their faces and instruments, and how fluidly and elegantly she moves while doing this work.

“Dancing with the band is how I approach it mentally,” she says. “I consider what I do more dancing than anything.”

With the Inhale/Exhale tour encompassing 98 headlining shows along with festival dates over the last two years, Barylsky has had plenty of opportunity to dance. Rüfüs’ motion director, Barylsky is a longtime (and full-time) member of the team who on this tour has been onstage for 10-13 songs per show, roughly half the performance. Her work is not only artistic but athletic, requiring serious coordination as she moves at a rapid pace, her camera giving a live feed to the massive LED screens on each side of the stage. Barylsky says she’s doing so much onstage that her Oura Ring doesn’t even pick up all the movement, “so I’ve never had an understanding of the steps I take.”

“It’s funny that when [the audience] sees her working, they want to know the step count,” says Rüfüs’ creative director Katzki. “I don’t think they fully understand what she is actually giving them. It is not only incredibly athletic and physical, but is a live interpretation of the music happening in that moment… People don’t understand how much it changes how you hear the music. It’s just someone shooting the show with a camera and running around, but there is second-by-second instinctive decision making. You feel it.”

Barylsky grew up in Hawaii filming weddings and local concerts. When her sister moved to Los Angeles to become a flight attendant in 2017, Barylsky – seeing an opportunity to pursue her own career – went with. In L.A., she met Lindqvist, George and Hunt through a mutual friend while they were writing their 2018 album Solace.

“We were instant friends,” she says. “From there, it was just that I always had a camera in my hand.” Rüfüs and Katzki (whose real name is Alex George and who is the brother of Jon George) saw a video she’d directed for another group and invited her to make the video for 2018’s “No Place.”

“So we did that together out in the desert,” she says, “and then they were like, ‘Want to come on tour?’”

Barylsky has toured with the band on their runs for Solace and 2021’s Surrender. But in more ways than one, Inhale/Exhale has been a new level of accomplishment. The tour ended earlier this month when Rüfüs headlined Austin City Limits, and is, according to Billboard Boxscore, the highest grossing and bestselling electronic tour of all time, grossing $158 million and selling 1.7 million tickets.

It’s also the first of the band’s tours to use IMAG screens, the technical term for the giant LED screens on each side of the stage. This addition has transformed Barylsky’s contribution. Formerly, she’d film on stage then edit the footage into a recap video for socials. While she still does that now, the introduction of the IMAGs made it so that she was shooting live, with her camera connected directly to the screens.

Barylsky’s first time working in this format was Rüfüs’ 2023 headlining set at Osheaga, where she filmed a single song, “Surrender.” “We were just buzzed,” she says. “We were like, ‘This is such an evolution of the show.’” By the time Rüfüs headlined Portola 2024, where the band debuted new music from Inhale Exhale along with a new setup, she was onstage for three songs.

“It wasn’t rehearsed,” she says. “It was very much like ‘okay, I’m going live now.’”

Her presence expanded from there. After Inhale/Exhale was released on Oct. 11, 2024, the band went into a two-week rehearsal period in an arena space in Beaumont, Texas. Here, Barylsky and Katzki studied the setlist and, she says, “came up with the visual language for each song that I would be on for.”

“Leah is an artist,” says Katzki, “so we have another artist on stage along with the band. The camera is her instrument, and she is able to glide from one musical moment happening on one side of the stage to another seamlessly, at different heights and from different angles. And yet she does it in a way that allows for chance and finding something new in the moment.”

Incredibly, she’s only tripped twice, once in the summer of 2025 during a show in Poland and once earlier this month at ACL when stepping onstage during “Breathe.” “I fell on my knees in front of Tyrone, but the IMAG director kept my feed up and I instantly got up and kept going,” she says. “It’s honestly one of my favorite moments, because even if for a split second I was embarrassed because there were 70,000 people watching, I like that it reiterates the point that it’s live.”

All in, she says her favorite part of the show was the hardest one to pull off, during the breakdown of “The Life” into “Until the Sun Needs To Rise.” Here, she had to pass her camera to Katzki, who then brought it down to the pit to then pass it back to her during “Levitating” in order to make the camera feel like it was floating as well.  

“So Alex is passing it up to me, and I’m exhausted at this point,” she says. “I have a minute, but it feels like two seconds. I’m on James’ left side, and then Alex is running back and forth really fast, and then when I come around to James’ side, he passes it back to me. By this point I’m about to pass out, but the adrenaline is so high. Just getting to work with Alex in that way, where we get to play and be kids every single night, it’s my favorite part.”

During the show she could mostly block out the audience in order to fous, finally taking a moment to really see the crowd near the close of the show, during the band’s swooning, era-defining “Innerbloom.”

“When I turn the camera and Tyrone sings ‘I’m yours’ and the crowd sings it back, it’s just this really emotional moment,” she says. “I stand with the band and everyone’s just roaring. Even the days when I’m so exhausted or in a particular mindset where I’m like, ‘I don’t want to do the show tonight,’ that moment is always like, ‘Wow, this is your life.’”

Having been seen by upwards of two million people (counting headlining sets and festival shows) Barylsky now gets noticed by fans in hotel lobbies, an element of the job she says she’s still getting used to. “I always say I wish the invisibility cloak from Harry Potter existed, because if it did, I would wear it. I’ve never intended to be part of the show in the way I am, so it’s been an adjustment. Not a bad one, but I never expected it would become what it has.”

With the tour now wrapped, Barylsky is, for the moment, out of the spotlight. Her duties for the foreseeable future are backend work like editing, then eventually filming the guys when they get back in the studio. But for all the thrill of the screens and the crowd roar and the adrenaline, Barylsky’s favorite moments of the historic tour were those only she and guys were privy to.

“We’re around people all day,” she says, “but before the show it’s just John, James, Ty, Alex, and me. Everyone leaves, and we get 15 minutes to breathe together as one, and it’s really quiet.”

From there, depending on the night, they might dissolve into giggles, or pull each other into a group hug, or work themselves into a frenzy pumping their fists together and chanting. Whatever the ritual, it ends the same way: with the five of them walking out into the noise together.

“It’s another moment,” Barylsky says, “that in a very opposite way makes me go, ‘I can’t believe this is my life.’”