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Biography
Mallory Catlett is an Obie award winning creator/director of performance across disciplines; from opera and music theater to plays and installation art. Her works have premiered in New York at 3LD, HERE, the Ontological-Hysteric Theater, PS122, Abrons Arts Center, The Chocolate Factory, The Collapsable Hole and the Ohio Theatre, and have been featured at the Ice Factory, CultureMart, COIL, Prelude and BAM's Next Wave Festival. Regionally, her work has been seen at EMPAC (Troy NYC), American Repertory Theater (Cambridge), ASU Gammage (Tempe), DiverseWorks (Houston), Z Space (San Francisco) & Redfern Center (Keene, NH). International touring includes Les Escales improbables (Montreal), Kilkenny Arts Festival (Ireland), Edinburgh Fringe Festival (Scotland), Dublin Fringe, (Ireland) Exit Festival (Créteil, France), Noorderzon Festival (Groningen, Netherlands), Adelaide Festival (Australia), Brighton Festival and Bristol's Mayfest (UK) and the PuSh Festival (Canada).
She has worked with visual artists Dread Scott (Decision) and Nene Humphrey (Circling the Center, Transmission, Lining Out), media artists Keith Skretch (This Was The End, Archive, Decoder), Jim Findlay (City Council Meeting) and Peter Norrman (Red Fly Blue Bottle, Tinder) and sound artists Lea Bertucci (Dead Time of Plenty) and G Lucas Crane (OH WHAT WAR, This Was The End, Archive, Decoder). She has directed new operas and music theater works by composers Eve Beglarian (The Vicksburg Project), Mika Karlsson (The Echo Drift, 2018), Stefan Weissman (Scarlet Ibis), Aaron Seigel (Brother Brother), Tarik O'Regan (Wanton Sublime), Christina Campanella (Red Fly Blue Bottle, Tinder), Dave Malloy (Beowulf, Space//Space, The Sewers) and James Beckwith Maxwell (Sleepy Head).
Fascinated by time and our relationship to it, her performances often adapt pre-existing texts - William Burroughs, Jack Kerouc, Allen Ginsberg, Shakespeare, Brecht, Rimbaud, Margaret Sanger, Marguerite Duras, Joan Littlewood, Patrik Ouredník, Oswald Spengler, Alfred Korzybski, Louise Bogan, Andy Warhol, Chekhov, Proust, The Supreme Court's Dred Scott Decision, City Council Meeting Transcripts and a Civil War Diary. She recently completed her first libretto with composer Aaron Seigel, Rainbird, adapting a Janet Frame novel.
She has written about her work in Canadian Theatre Review ("Madness and Method in This Room Is Moving” Number 119 Summer 2004), Contemporary Spanish Plays (Introduction to Off Side by Sergi Belbel, vol 35, 2012), Theater (“City Council Meeting” Script and Essay, Volume 43, Issue 3 Fall 2013), Performance Research (This Was The End: the pseudoscopic effect” Vol 23, No.8 January 2019), PAJ (“Decoding the Reality Studio” with Alex Wermer-Colan and G Lucas Crane, Vol 42, Issue 2 - May 2020) and is currently working on her first book with Aaron Landsman called No Is Qualified: City Council Meeting for Iowa University Press.
She received her high school diploma from the North Carolina School for the Arts, where she studied classical ballet, a BA from Bard College in Drama and Dance and an Interdisciplinary MFA from The School for Contemporary Arts, Simon Fraser University, Vancouver, where she continued to directed and dramaturged 10 works for theater, opera and dance.
From 2004-2013 Catlett was an ensemble member of Banana Bag & Bodice where she directed Space//Space, The Fall & Rise of the Rising Fallen, The Sewers, Panel.Animal and The Young War and co-directed the touring version of Beowulf with Rod Hipskind. She is a longtime collaborator with playwright and director Aaron Landsman with whom she co-created with designer Jim Findlay City Council Meeting, and directed Patient Boy, and Running Away From the One with the Knife. She has also worked on plays by – Tanya Marquardt, Masha Marianna Salzmann, Harold Pinter, Kuro Tanino, Stephanie Fleischman, Kristen Kosmos, Anne Washburn, Toshiki Okada, Sergi Belbel, Thomas Bradshaw, Normand Chaurette, Lluissa Cunille, Guillem Clua, Xiemena Escalante, Christina Masciotti, Jason Craig and Naomi Wallace.
Catlett was a member of the 2006 Soho Rep Writer/Director Lab, and she has been a resident artist at Mount Tremper Arts, Baryshnikov Arts Center, CultureHub, MacDowell, Gibney Dance, Performing Garage, the Ontological's Incubator, Abrons Arts Center, HERE's HARP Program, Mabou Mines, Yaddo, Chashama, Digital Performance Institute, The Shadbolt Centre for the Arts and a British Studies Fellow at the Harry Ransom Research Center at UT-Austin. Her work has been funded by the Jerome Foundation, Foundation for Contemporary Arts, New York Council for the Humanities, Graham Foundation, New York State Music Fund, NPN, NYSCA, LMCC (MCAF and Swing Space grants), Puffin Foundation, NYSCA (2 individual artist commissions), Edith Lutyens & Norman Bel Geddes Fund, Tobin Theatre Arts Fund, Mary Duke Biddle Foundation, Strickland Family Foundation, Greenwall Foundation, MAP Fund, NEFA, Mid Atlantic Arts Foundation. She received the Elliott Hayes Award for Dramaturgy for her co-direction of the Juggernaut's series THE FIRST 100 YEARS: The Professional Female Playwright. She curated the Martin E Segal's Spotlight: Catalan Reading and Translation Series (2010). She is the recipient of the Foundation for the Contemporary Arts 2015 Grants to Artists Award and a 2016 Creative Capital Grantee. She is an associate artist at CultureHub, a member of the Collapsable Hole an artist-run development and performance venue at the Westbeth Arts Center, the co-artistic director of Mabou Mines, and the artistic director of Restless Productions NYC whose work received a Special Citation Obie and a Bessie and Henry Hewes Award for Design.
Productions
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Artist Information
All information is derived from OPERA America's Season Schedule of Performances and titles databases which date back to 1991. OPERA America is constantly updating this data. If you feel that a work or an artist has been omitted or that information is incorrect, please use the linked forms below. Title Information Form Artist Information Form
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