In rehearsal / in the works

Welcome! I am Kate Powers; I am a stage director, a prison theatremaker, an artistic mental health practitioner, a college professor. I am an artist with training in consent-based and trauma-informed ways of working, holding the space, sharing the temporal real estate. This is my portfolio.

During the past few years, my most meaningful work has been in academic and carceral spaces while I have also been caring for elders at the end of their lives. I am keen to bring tools I have been refining for equity, for anti-racist practice, for building the kind of trust that makes genuine risk-taking possible back into the professional arena.

In 2025, I contributed a chapter, “Like Bright Metal on Sullen Ground,” to Shakespeare in the Age of Mass Incarceration, edited by Gina Hausknecht and Liz Fox. In August 2023, I was published, in collaboration with Frannie Shepherd-Bates, in Shakespeare and Social Engagement, edited by Rowan Mackenzie and Robert Shaughnessy. Frannie and I co-authored a chapter: “Mind the Gap: Working Across Lines of Difference in Carceral Shakespeare.”

I was thrilled beyond measure (beyond even measure for measure, you could say) that to direct for Shakespeare in Delaware Park in 2024; my career really started on that hill, as a teen-aged apprentice. I directed The Winter’s Tale for Buffalo, because I think it is a play that strives to answer the question, ‘what do you do AFTER the unspeakably horrific thing has happened?’ (Pictured below are Raynardo Shedrick, Gabriella McKinley as Perdita, Jake Hayes as Florizel, Tuhran Gethers, and members of the ensemble.) In her Buffalo Stages substack, Melinda Miller wrote, “‘A Winter’s Tale worth the telling — Shakespeare in Delaware Park solves the problems of the problem play with panache.”

I directed Selina Fellinger’s POTUS in Fall 2024; I think everyone involved in the production was hoping that we might see the first woman elected to the highest office in the land the month after we closed, but it was not to be. (Pictured below is VerNia Garvin as the First Lady, with the legs of her castmates.)

Working with Rehabilitation Through the Arts, my team and I are in our third year of working with the incarcerated ensemble at Collins Correctional Facility.