Faculty Member Since 2016
Kathleen Wessel is a movement artist, choreographer, director, writer, and educator from Orlando, Florida. She holds an MFA in dance performance and choreography from Florida State University and a BA in psychology from Emory University, where she was a member of Phi Beta Kappa and a Goodrich C. White Scholar.
In 2007, she co-founded the Atlanta-based Staibdance and danced with the company for a decade. In addition, she served as the company's Managing Director and co-created the Staibdance Summer Intensive in Sorrento, Italy. For eight years, she was the faculty coordinator and a faculty member on the Italy Intensive. Wessel has performed and taught throughout the American Southeast, Las Vegas, New York, Italy, and Sweden, and her movement studies have taken her to The Place in London, the Suzanne Dellal Centre for Dance and Theater in Tel Aviv, and the B12 festival in Berlin.
Wessel is a senior lecturer and co-chair of the Department of Dance Performance and Choreography. She teaches dance writing, theory, composition, and technique courses and was the director of Spelman Dance Theater for five years.
From 2019-2020, Wessel served as an associate director and co-choreographer for The Georgia Incarceration Performance Project Presents: By Our Hands, an award-winning devised archives-to-performance production exploring the history of convict labor in Georgia. The production received an Honorable Mention for Outstanding Public History Project from the National Council on Public History in 2020. Wessel received three “Best of Theater: Choreography” awards from the Orlando Sentinel: in 2020 for the immersive walking play Bright Young Things and in 2021 and 2023 for Nosferatu, an immersive horror experience produced by the Renaissance Theater Company in Orlando.
For her work on HEREafter with Brooklyn-based co-director Kelly Bartnik, Wessel received a Carnegie/Rockefeller Divisional Priority award through Spelman College and a Pandemic Atlanta Grant through the City of Atlanta Mayor’s Office on Cultural Affairs. She was also a recipient of the 2020 Idea Capital grant. In addition, Wessel is an accomplished choreographer for musical theater. Favorite credits include "Metamorphoses," "The Crucible," "How to Succeed in Business Without Really Trying," "A Chorus Line," and "The Apple," an original production she created with director Donald Rupe for the Orlando Fringe Festival.
Before landing at Spelman, Wessel taught dance and Pilates at Emory University and Oxford College of Emory, where she was director of Oxford Dance Company for three years. Her choreography has been twice selected for American College Dance Association Gala concerts. Wessel is also a regular contributor to ArtsATL.
Dance writing, theory, composition, and technique courses
ArtsATL: “Meet Me on the Porch” shows off Spelman’s new dance department and West End studio
“Outstanding Choreography” award at the New York Musical Festival for work on the original production "Flying Lessons," written and directed by Rupe