An Obie and Bessie award-winning creator/director of performance across disciplines from opera to installation art, Catlett’s work in New York has premiered and been performed at 3LD, HERE, Ontological-Hysteric, PS122, Abrons, Chocolate Factory, and EMPAC; featured at COIL, Prototype, and BAM’s Next Wave; developed at CultureHub, Barishnykov Arts, Pioneer Works, Watermill Center, McDowell, Performing Garage, HERE, Mabou Mines, LMCC, EMPAC, and Yaddo; and toured internationally to Canada, France, United Kingdom, Ireland, and Australia. She has received three MAP Fund grants, two NYSCA Commissions, a 2016 Creative Capital Grant, and a 2015 Foundation for the Contemporary Arts Grants to Artists Award. Catlett is the founder of Restless Production NYC (restlessproductionsnyc.org), an associate artist at CultureHub, a member of the Collapsable Hole (an artist-run development and performance venue), and the newly appointed co-artistic director of Mabou Mines. She has written about her work in Canadian Theatre Review, Theatre Magazine, Performance Research, and PAJ. Her first book, co-written with Aaron Landsman and called No One Is Qualified: a Primer for Participation, will be published in 2022 by Iowa University Press. SLC, 2021–
Previous Courses
MFA Theatre
3D Dramaturgy: Finding Voice Through the Generative Process
Component—Year
3D Dramaturgy is a mechanism for uncovering the connections among the artist, the source material/subject matter, and the moment of making—and for generating forms that reflect this unique confluence. In this course, students will create an artist statement focused on the central questions/interests of their practice, their sense of purpose, and their relationship to their audience. Each student will choose a piece of source material that allows him or her to explore these questions and relationships in three dimensions. The course will be split into theoretical readings/discussions and studio work, in which each student will create a series of performative iterations. In the first semester, we will use Andrew Simonet’s process for creating an artist statement from Making a Life as an Artist and Jacques Ranciere’s The Emancipated Spectator to think through the artists' relationship to audience. Ideas-Arrangements-Effects, by the Design Studio for Social Interventions, will be used to create a framework for talking about and approaching studio work. In the studio, we will work across disciplines—with sound, light, projection, costume, objects, text, and task—in an effort to make “ideas operational in the generation of the new” (Richard Foreman). In the second semester, students will take on more responsibilities in selecting readings and leading discussions of theoretical texts pertinent to their own research as a means to engender greater understanding and to create a community of artists who can support and challenge each other through collaboration, listening, and constructive critique.