Finalist: Kate Cayley
RBC Emerging Artist Award
Kate Cayley is a playwright and director. She is the co-founder and artistic director of feminist theatre company Stranger Theatre, for which she has written or co-written East of the Sun, West of the Moon, The Yellow Wallpaper Project, The Clown of God, The Counterfeit Marquise, LUZ, The World Turned Upside Down, and what Alice found there, and Käthe Kollwitz.
She is currently involved with Stranger Theatre’s latest collective piece, Marrying the Hangman, based on a bizarre happening in 18th century Montreal when a woman was sentenced to death for stealing gloves from her employer and saved her life by persuading the man imprisoned in the next cell to marry her. Kate’s work with Stranger Theatre has been performed in Toronto, Halifax, Montreal, Pittsburgh, Philadelphia, Istanbul and most recently at the HERE Arts Centre in New York City (and what Alice found there.)
She is also the co-founder and co-artistic director of The Cooking Fire Theatre Festival, a festival of original, outdoor work by grassroots, artist-run companies held in Toronto since 2004. The festival has presented work by companies from Toronto, Halifax, Ottawa, Montreal, New York City, and Portugal, and draws a wider audience each year. Her poetry and critical writing has appeared in The Antigonish Review, existere, CV2, Room, dANDelion, Studio and The Canadian Theatre Review, and is forthcoming in The Fiddlehead.
She was a member of Tarragon Theatre’s 2008 Playwright’s Unit, and is now Tarragon’s newest playwright in residence, working on Concerning the Children of Unmarried Persons, an exploration of the legacy of forced adoptions in Ontario, and The Arcanum, about the life and times of a seventeenth century alchemist.