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ABOUT THE ARTISTS

KATIE PEARL (Writer/Performer) is a director, playwright, and social practice artist whose work is fueled by the belief that personal encounter and creative exchange are necessary in a humane world. Her projects range from plays to interactive installation to community-wide collaborations, and invite audiences and participants into radically imaginative situations that playfully challenge traditional structures and norms. As co-Artistic Director of PearlDamour, the interdisciplinary company she shares with playwright Lisa D’Amour, Katie has co-created, directed, and sometimes performed in a body of work spanning 20 years and 13 cities. PearlDamour’s recognition includes an Obie (Nita & Zita — which was a KoFest performance in 2005), a Creative Capital Award (How to Build a Forest), four Multi-Arts Production Fund Awards (LandMark, Terrible Things, How to Build a Forest), two NEA Our Town grants (Milton), and a NYSCA individual artist commission.

She is a producer of the documentary The Rest I Make Up about the visionary Cuban-American dramatist Maria Irene Fornes, which premiered at MoMA in February 2018 and is now screening at Festivals world-wide (Women Make Movies, distributor); she directed Fornes’ masterpiece What of the Night? at UCSD while serving there as the 2017 Quinn Martin Distinguished Chair of Directing. She is a founding member of Climate Lens, and is a co-founder of Works on Water, a triennial dedicated to supporting artists working on, near, and with the world’s waterways. Katie has been a Visiting Lecturer at Harvard University and an Anschutz Fellow at Princeton, where her teaching and research focus on the concept of the Artist-Citizen.

Katie received her MFA in Writing for Performance from Brown University in 2015. She lives in Brooklyn with her partner, filmmaker Michelle Memran.

Upcoming projects include joining the faculty of Wesleyan University, directing and developing Tar Sands Songbook with Canadian violinist Tanya Kalmanovitch; writing Iodame for the San Francisco-based STATIONS project with Jubilith Moore (a KoFest 2019 rehearsal residency project); a new PearlDamour commission from the American Repertory Theatre and the Harvard University Center for the Environment called Ocean Filibuster. For more visit http://katiepearl.com/

CARRIE J. COLE (Performer) KoFest’s Resident Dramaturg and Company Manager. Recently she directed Sarah Delappe’s The Wolves. She also devised and directed a production titled Electriad, which explored the repercussions of war from the perspective of the warrior, the home front, and the displaced/refugee. Other projects include directing Lauren Gunderson’s I and You and Ray Bradbury’s adaptation of his own Fahrenheit 451. As an advocate for new plays, Dr. Cole regularly produces and directs “Flash Play Festivals”—readings of ten minute plays written by award-winning authors at both the International Conference of the Fantastic in the Arts and the Other Words Conference. In addition, her own reimagining of H. G. Wells’ War of the Worlds, which reflected the current exploration of Mars, was staged as part of the Tucson Festival of Books by Arizona Theatre Company.

Cole is an assistant professor of integrative theatre studies in the Department of Theater and Dance at Indiana University of Pennsylvania. After receiving her PhD from the University of Maryland in Theatre and Performance Studies with a focus on turn of the twentieth century American theatre and performance, she shifted her focus to the turn of the twenty-first century. Her scholarship now focuses on current and future trends in US theatre, performance and popular culture, (specifically staging science fiction and the fantastic).

Dr. Cole has presented her scholarship at US and international conferences, including Stage the Future, The International Conference of the Fantastic in the Arts, Science Fiction Research Association, The Network of Ensemble Theatres, and The Association of Theatre in Higher Education where she is currently the Dramaturgy Focus Group Representative. She is a member of the conference organizing committee for Science Fictions, Popular Cultures in Hawaii.

LAURIE McCANTS (Performer) co-founded the Bloomsburg Theatre Ensemble (BTE) in 1978. Her original work includes INDUSTRIOUS ANGELS, which appeared at last summer’s Ko Festival, directed by Sabrina Hamilton. THE ALEXANDRIA CARRY-ON (in collaboration with composer/performer Theo Bleckmann, designers Sabrina Hamilton, Rand Whipple, and Elaine Williams), which was performed at the Ko Festival in 2004, prior to its Egyptian tour.

She has been a rehearsal residency artist at Ko, and she has taught two of our 6-day intensive workshops; one on “Breath, Voice and Presence” and another, co-taught with fellow BTE member, Gerard Stropnicky, on “Creating Theatre from Historical and Documentary Sources.”

Among the hundreds of roles she has played at BTE, she counts as favorites Winnie in Samuel Beckett’s HAPPY DAYS, and the Gravedigger in HAMLET. She directed BATTLES OF FIRE AND WATER at Perseverance Theatre in Juneau, Alaska, where she was honored to be adopted as a kiks.adi Tlingit.  She has served on the Board of the Network of Ensemble Theaters and in 2011, she was awarded a “Distinguished Achievement” Fellowship through the Theatre Communications Group/Fox Foundation Fellowship.

SHEILA SIRAGUSA (Performer) is one of the founders of the KO Festival of Performance and is thrilled to be back for this season!   Also one of the founders of The August Company, her directing credits there include Taming of the Shrew, King Lear, Much Ado About Nothing, Twelfth Night and As You Like It.  As an actor she has appeared in ONWORDS: Gone and Santacide for The August Company and as Ellen Van Oss in Lee Blessing’s Two Rooms at Silverthorne Theatre. Other directing credits include New Century Theatre: Sunset Limited, The How and the Why and Hold These Truths, Chester Theatre:  An Iliad, Mercy of a Storm, Blackbird, Memory House and the New England premiere of Marilyn Campbell and Curt Columbus’s Crime and Punishment, The Academy of Music: Building the Wall, Nobody’s Girl, Sweet, Sweet Spirit and work with Librettist Harley Erdman and Composer Eric Sawyer on their original opera, Garden of Martyrs, The Majestic Theatre: Alabama Story, Hubbard Hall Theatre: An Iliad and at the University of Massachusetts: the Opera Workshop and Opera: On the Air. She is currently at work on the New England premiere of Erin McKeown’s musical Miss You Like Hell for the spring of 2019 at The Academy of Music in Northampton. Sheila is a teacher of acting and directing and has worked at NYU’s Stella Adler Conservatory, Parson’s School of Design, the State University of New York at Oneonta, the University of Massachusetts and Smith College.

SABRINA HAMILTON (Lighting Design) co-founded and is the Artistic Director of the Ko Festival of Performance in Amherst, MA. For many years she worked with the New York theater company Mabou Mines as Lighting Designer, Production Manager, Stage Manager, Performer, and Assistant Director. Other credits include work at the New York Shakespeare Festival, the Goodman Theatre, the Mark Taper Forum and 6 years as Route Lighting Designer for New York’s Village Halloween Parade under the direction of Ralph Lee. International lighting credits include work in Berlin, Bologna, Florence, Milan, London, Grenada, Geneva, Nuremburg, Paris, Rio de Janeiro, Amsterdam, Brussels, Cardiff, Edinburgh, Hong Kong, at the Bristol Old Vic, the Theatre Academy in Tampere, Finland, and at the International Theatre Festival in Havana, Cuba. She has spent much of the past several years touring with Sandglass Theater. as the lighting designer for their production of D-GENERATION: An Exaltation of Larks, the show that closed Ko’s season on “Age & Aging.”

Sabrina’s directing work, primarily original pieces, has been seen in New York, Berlin and throughout New England. She directed CRAVINGS: Songs of Hunger and Satisfaction, that premiered at the 2008 Ko Festival and then went on on to a three-week, sold-out run at the Central Square Theatre in Cambridge, MA, where it garnered a  nomination for an IRNE Award.  Other directing  credits include, INDUSTRIOUS ANGELS, the show that closed Ko’s 2018 season.