Focus: Diversity, equity, and inclusion analysis and training
At home in both corporate and non-profit environments, Kate Powers has taught, coached or directed at the National Theatre in London, the Juilliard School, the University of Minnesota, at Fortune 500 companies including Credit Suisse, PaineWebber, Cisco, and Novartis and, significantly, at Sing Sing Correctional Facility and Fishkill Correctional Facility.
Kate has been a facilitator, teacher and director with Rehabilitation Through the Arts (RTA) at Sing Sing Correctional Facility, a maximum security prison, for more than a decade. She founded The Redeeming Time Project to teaching critical life skills to the incarcerated and the formerly incarcerated through the exploration of Shakespeare and the theatre.
Working with incarcerated men since early 2009, Kate had an experiential crash course in both privilege and oppression. She was inspired by the men with whom she worked to deepen her racial analysis, and then to deepen it some more; this commitment to educating herself and striving to understand will comprise the work of a lifetime. Kate is passionate about issues of social justice and racial equity; she believes that it is incumbent upon her as a white woman to work to repair not just the harm that she has individually caused, but to work to dismantle the barriers to equity and the structures that actively exclude and oppress BIPOC folx.
A Drama League Directing Fellow and a Fulbright Scholar in Shakespeare, Kate earned her M.A. with Distinction at the Shakespeare Institute in Stratford-upon-Avon. She was a participant in the 2014 January Intensive at Shakespeare & Co. She has also earned a Certificate in Arts Administration from New York University, and an M.F.A. with a focus on social justice from the University of Idaho.