About
Katt Lissard
In recent work, like the multi-phased Memory of a Drowning Landscape based in Lesotho, I’ve continued my exploration of place, memory, and water – and how the three are becoming more connected/dis-connected as our destruction of the environment and our communities accelerates.
Along with performance work and writing, I also teach. A longtime faculty member of the Graduate Institute at Goddard College (2002-2019), I’m currently teaching in the Department of Ethnic and Race Studies at City University’s BMCC in New York. I’m also the artistic director of The Winter/Summer Institute (WSI), a collaborative, multi-country Applied Theatre project that takes place in New York City and Lesotho, southern Africa (on pause due to the pandemic).
For the past sixteen years, much of my artistic work/life has been connected to Lesotho. Since January 2005, when I arrived on a Fulbright to teach, research, and direct shows at the National University in Roma, I’ve been making collaborative projects there involving students, colleagues, professional performers, NGO staff and members of rural village communities. My time in Lesotho continues to transform the way I look at and understand the world. Projects like Memory of a Drowning/Drying Landscape, Outpost, and Surrogate Traveller take those disparate observations, stories, lessons, and incongruities and feed them into performance, writing, and community interaction.
I’ve written about this theatre work for magazines, journals, and anthologies, including a chapter, “Venus in Lesotho: Women, Theatre and the Collapsible Boundaries of Silence,” in the Palgrave McMillan anthology, Feminist Popular Education in Transnational Debates: Building Pedagogies of Possibility A piece about the Winter/Summer Institute is forthcoming in the book A Grassroots Leadership and Arts for Social Change Primer (2021). Awards and residencies include: African Regional Research Fulbright Scholar teaching awards, Barbara Deming/Money for Women Foundation award, Art Matters grants, MacDowell Colony residencies, Jerome Foundation-sponsored Lanesboro residency, IRT Theater 3B Development residencies, and Mabou Mines Resident Artist Program awards.
memory lab
memory lab is a loosely connected network of activist artists who’ve worked together on each other’s projects in theatres, on the streets, and in alternative spaces since the 90s – focused on experimenting with performance ideas and forms of social engagement we find compelling. Upcoming projects include work on the fourth, Transition phase, of Memory of a Drowning/Drying Landscape, which begins in January 2019 in Lesotho; and the more localized (NYC) arm of the experiment, Surrogate Traveller.
Our development work on Outpost: an experimental conversation at Mabou Mines and IRT provided a frame for some of us to “think about” – via live performance – some of these ideas.
Outpost casts included: Haleh Abghari, Kelly Coffield Park, Tamu Favorite, Nell Del Giudice, Vanessa R. Evans, Audrey Hailes, Hall Hunsinger, LeeAnne Hutchison, Katt Lissard, Cecil MacKinnon, Gregor Paslawsky, Christopher Randolph, Da’vine Joy Randolph, Dan Shor, Seth Sibanda
