Kathryn Walat
Kathryn Walat is a playwright and opera librettist, whose work has been produced across the country. She teaches courses related to playwriting and dramatic literature and is the founder and artistic director the Theatre Program’s FRESH ACTS festival of new plays.
Her play Victoria Martin: Math Team Queen was produced Off-Broadway at the Women’s Project and published in New Playwrights: The Best Plays of 2007. Her play Creation—about music, obsession, and the artistic process—was developed at the Eugene O’Neill Theatre Center/National Playwrights Conference, and premiered at the Theatre @ Boston Court in Pasadena, for which she was nominated for an LA Stage Alliance Ovation Award for Playwriting. Her co-adaptation with playwright Jeffrey Hatcher of the Elizabethan thriller Arden of Faversham premiered Off-Broadway with Red Bull Theater and was nominated for a 2022 Drama Desk Award for Outstanding Adaptation.
Other plays include Bleeding Kansas (Hangar Theatre, Ithaca; Francesca Primus Citation), See Bat Fly (Brown/Trinity Playwrights Rep, Kilroy’s List), Small Town Values (The O’Neill’s National Playwrights Conference; PlayLabs), Romeo & Naomi Ramirez (Playwrights Center Ruth Easton Series; SheWrites Festival; Kilroy’s List), and Mary Shelley Meets Frankenstein (New George’s Audrey Residency; funded by NYFA/NYSCA).
She is also co-librettist of the chamber opera Paul’s Case, adapted from the Willa Cather story with composer Gregory Spears, produced at the Prototype Festival (NYC) and Pittsburgh Opera, and named in The New Yorker’s list of Ten Notable Performances for 2014. Its recording was named in Opera News’ “5 Best New Works” of 2019 and is available on Spotify. Jason and the Argonauts, an opera for young audiences commissioned by the Lyric Opera of Chicago, toured to over 20,000 students in 2016 and will be remounted in fall 2023. Other works include The Echo Drift (co-librettist; Prototype Festival) and an opera in development about Alexander Graham Bell that explores issues of accessibility using American Sign Language.
Kate is an affiliated artist with New Georges (NYC) and the Playwrights’ Center (Minneapolis), and a member of the Dramatists Guild of America, where she serves on the Opera Committee. Her plays are published by Concord Theatricals and Playscripts. She holds an MFA in Playwriting from the Yale School of Drama, and a BA in English and American Literature with honors in Creative Writing from Brown University.