Caitlin Kane is a publicly engaged artist/scholar completing her Ph.D. in the Department of Performing and Media Arts. Her dissertation, Acts of Witness: Research-Based Performance, Post Truth Politics, and the Cultivation of Resistant Imaginations, examines how artists use research methodologies to contest and expand public understandings of how knowledge is made and who has the authority to make it. She argues that research-based performance methodologies can help us to make sense of the world in an era characterized by post-truth discourse. More importantly, these methodologies model approaches to collective care and collaborative knowledge-making that are essential to envisioning and enacting more just and equitable futures.
Caitlin is also a freelance director and dramaturg focused on developing new works of queer and feminist performance. Her recent projects at Cornell include directing Leigh Fondakowski's Spill, co-directing The Loneliness Project, and co-directing Climates of Change. Her current professional projects include assistant directing and dramaturging Leigh Fondakowski’s newest play, Casa Cushman, which centers on the nineteenth-century lesbian actress, Charlotte Cushman, and the collective of emancipated women who surrounded her, dramaturging Joshua Groffman and Sarah Heady's opera, Halcyon, which investigates what happens when a place that matters to us comes to ruin through the story of the closure of an all women's college in Millbrook, NY, and continuing to collaborate with Kelli Simpkins on the development of The Loneliness Project, an interview-based play about intergenerational loneliness in Chicago's LGBTQIA+ communities.
Kane's research has been supported by multiple grants and fellowships, including a Provost Diversity Fellowship, an Engaged Cornell Graduate Student Grant, a New York Public Humanities Fellowship, and a Fulbright Fellowship. Her scholarly writing has appeared in Theatre Topics and in the forthcoming collection The Scholar as Human: Enacting the Liberal Arts in Public (Cornell University Press, 2020).
Caitlin holds an MA in Theater Arts from Cornell University, an M.Ed. in Curriculum and Instruction from the University of Cincinnati, and a BA in English Literature from the University of Cincinnati.