2026 | Maine Artist Fellowship | Performing Arts Fellow

Artist Statement:

Kate believes the creative impulse belongs to everyone and that storytelling is at the heart of who we are. She is inspired by theatre as a collaborative craft to celebrate community, deepen belonging, and rediscover place. Kate creates vivid, intimate worlds for our shared experience of the transformative and profound- a poetic realm for the collective reckoning of who we are and who we could be.

Her work leans into the mythic, epic, and bold with a deft simplicity and unabashed theatricality. She is drawn to stories and characters historically kept in the shadows; illuminating their depths in spare, embodied, and lyrical ways. Kate meets every project as a creative collaborator in the spirit of both rigor and play, driven by a boundless curiosity for the human condition and our connection to the natural world.

Bio:

Kate is an award-winning director and theatremaker based on unceded Wabanaki land in what we now call Maine. As Founding Artistic Director of Threadbare Theatre Workshop, she has adapted, devised, and directed original, large-scale, site-responsive plays and reimaginings of the classics in New York City and rural places across Maine. Her work has been praised in American Theatre Magazine, the New York Times, and The Creator's Project.

Kate grew up in New Jersey, on unceded Lenape land, and spent childhood summers on her mother's family farm in the Irish Midlands. She trained as a theatre director at The Lir (MFA, Trinity College Dublin), Cheek by Jowl and SITI Company. She holds a BFA in Theatre Arts (Acting) from Rutgers, Mason Gross School of the Arts, and spent her most formative year at Shakespeare's Globe in London.

On winning a Maine Artist Fellowship:

"The Downeast coast has offered me community, belonging, and the gift of co-creating with the land and its people for the past ten years. The Maine Artist fellowship feels like a deep acknowledgement of this relationship, and I am grateful."

Artist Image Gallery: