Creator/director Mallory Catlett joins the Theater Program faculty for the fall 2020 semester to teach the intensive workshop Performance Ensemble and Advance Performance Ensemble courses. The ensembles culminate in the Bi-Co Theater Production each semester, normally fully staged live in-person performances. Under Catlett's direction for fall 2020, students will research and explore several texts by Japanese playwright and director Toshiki Okada from a variety of angles and approaches. "The Okada Project" will lead not to one finished production/play but a variety of iterations and actions both live and recorded.
Mallory Catlett is a creator, director, librettist, dramaturg, scholar and educator in the field of interdisciplinary performance. As Artistic Director of Restless NYC, Catlett strives "to challenge the expert and include the newcomer" and "to excavate the theatrical and literary record and to expand her own authorship." Restless NYC productions include Obie Award-winner "This Was the End," presented at the Chocolate Factory in 2014 and Mabou Mines in 2018 and described as “ a musical sculpture, a wayback machine dedicated to the material quality of memory” (Time Out NY). The company's new music theater work, "Rainbird," adapted from Janet Frame’s 1968 novel Yellow Flowers in the Antipodean Room, was recently in-residence at the Baryshnikov Arts Center in November 2019. "The Echo Drift," "a visually and aurally layered chamber opera about time and punishment" (The New York Times) was presented in the 2018 Prototype festival, an annual exploration of new opera.
Catlett's works, both solo and with Restless NYC, have been performed and presented widely nationally and internationally. She has received funding, residencies, and commissions from top arts organizations including New York Council for the Humanities, Gibney Dance, Lincoln Center Theater Directors Lab, and the Harry Ransom Research Center at the University of Texas at Austin.
Catlett received her high school diploma from the North Carolina School for the Arts, where she studied classical ballet, a B.A. of Arts in drama and dance from Bard College, and an interdisciplinary M.F.A. from The School for Contemporary Arts, Simon Fraser University, Vancouver, where she continues to work and collaborate. She is currently a member of the Collapsable Hole, an artist run development and performance venue in New York City.