hey y’all
I'm Katie.
I'm a performance artist, writer, theater maker, director, and educator.
My creative home is with the New York Neo-Futurists.
I’m the Theater Instructor at NC Governor’s School West.
I hold an MA in Arts Politics from NYU Tisch School of the Arts and a BA in Dramatic Art from UNC Chapel Hill.
Raised all over the South.
From many places, but mostly Asheville, North Carolina.
Based in Brooklyn, New York since 2015.
I make performances, poems, and public happenings about
Appalachia
Outer Space
leftist politics
being a woman
being queer
teenagehood
holiness
punks
sweat
love
and lots of other things.
My pronouns are she/her.
artist statement
I make plays, performance art, and poems that feel like:
That one warehouse party above a yellow school bus depot before Bushwick was ~Bushwick~ where you climbed the fire escape, passed strangers kissing, ascending to the roof where you swear you saw your dead friend and you swear he was dancing.
A barn dance that you snuck out of your mom’s house to go to, where somebody’s friend’s brother brought the keg, where you hopped in the cool girl’s wood-panel volkswagen, where you ate moonshine peaches for the first time, where you got lost and talked to animals in the dark woods.
The game of spin-the-bottle that started it all.
Piercing your friend’s ear and the safety pin gets stuck mid-flesh, what do we do? Don’t freak out, breathe. Breathe. Okay. One, two, three.
My scripts are poems, my poems are performances, my performances are songs, my songs are dances. My work is a mashup of Neo-Futurism, postmodern movement theater, and performance poetry. I joyfully smash together forms as disparate as living newspaper, southern gothic, queer punk performance art, and slapdash installation. I keep a foot in the dirt and a hand towards the cosmos, highlighting tensions between the sublime and grotesque, the highbrow and the lowbrow, the urban and rural. My theatrical work cultivates catharsis and community by inviting the audience to be an active participant in the work. It asks questions and leaves them unanswered, sometimes literally asking the audience: yes, you. Come up here with me.
I use my stories as a portal to the collective–-- I always leave room for people & ghosts alike. We’re born, live a life, and die over the course of a good piece of theater. I invite people to live that life with me. Everything I make is practice for the world I want to live in.
Art should open a portal to new worlds. Practice the world we want to live in. Make hard things beautiful and magic. Tessellate, transform, transmogrify. Art should remind us of what freedom feels like in the body so we can go make a world where we feel that all the time. Art should make us fall in love. I reach for this in everything I make.
My theater is the attempt.