Kit McKay

About Kit

Kit McKay is a director, educator, curator, and producer. Her career as a director has been marked by ensemble-based storytelling and a fixation on reinvigorating the classics. Her two stage productions at the Rose Theatre of Omaha were nominated for seven OEA awards (winning one), four TAG awards (winning one) including Best Direction for Tarzan, The Musical. McKay is best known for her role as Artistic Director and co-founder of Parallel 45 Theatre, an organization that brought professional theatre artists to the northern Michigan region for 13 years.

McKay served as a curator and producer for Lumberyard Contemporary Performing Arts in New York, where she helped assist in research and selection of all programs including the Performance Series, Solange MacArthur Award, Future Artists Initiative and Commissioning Program and the Incubator Residency Program. At Lumberyard, she heralded the works of Doug Elkins, Big Dance Theater, David Neumann, David Dorfman, Yvonne Rainer, Jennifer Tipton, Jack Ferver, Raja Feather Kelly, Wendy Whelan, Okwui Okpokwasili, and Zvi Gotheiner, among others.

McKay attended Interlochen Arts Camp in 1994 and graduated from Interlochen Arts Academy, Sarah Lawrence College, and Northwestern University’s Master of Fine Arts directing program, where she cut her teeth assisting on shows at Steppenwolf Theatre, Lookingglass Theatre, and Chicago Shakespeare Theatre, among others. She studied at the Yale School of Drama in theatre management and worked as a Yale Fellow at Seattle Repertory Theatre.

She is currently serving on the drama faculty at Stamford American International School in Singapore, where she teaches physical theatre, world puppetry, characterization, mask, melodrama, and devising.

McKay had the honor of spending many summers directing the Intermediate Repertory and Musical Productions and is thrilled to return this summer after a hiatus of 12 years. She is joined by her husband, Noah Durham Fried, and their two children, Scout and Ezra.

Kit has a passion for ensemble-driven storytelling and identity-conscious casting, which are two practices that interrogate and exorcize key aspects of lead culture.