Meet Kathleen Wessel, M.F.A.

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.

Since 2006, Kathleen has been collaborating with director Donald Rupe, and she is currently a choreographer with the Renaissance Theater in Orlando where Rupe now serves as Artistic Director. Kathleen has served as lead choreographer and Movement Director for the Renaissance Theater's annual immersive dance and theater experience Nosferatu since 2021 and has received two "Best of Theater: Choreography" awards from the Orlando Sentinel for her work on the large-scale production. In 2020, she won the same award for her choreography on Bright Young Things, an immersive walking play produced by Creative City Project. In 2019, Kathleen received an "Outstanding Choreography" award at the New York Musical Festival for her work on Flying Lessons, directed by Rupe.

With New-York based collaborator and co-director Kelly Bartnik, Kathleen owns Combo Platter Productions, a company dedicated to live immersive dance and theater events and performance workshops. Between 2018 and 2021, Kelly and Kathleen produced HEREafter Episodes 1 and 2 and curated HomeTraining, a walking gallery experience at the historic HL Green building in South Downtown Atlanta. For her work on HEREafter Kathleen 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 2020 Idea Capital grant recipient. 

In addition, Kathleen 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. 

Kathleen is currently a Senior Lecturer in the Department of Dance Performance and Choreography where she teaches Critical Writing for Dance, Choreographic Process, Improvisation, Dance Perspectives and Process, all levels of Choreographic Process, and Contemporary dance technique. She also directed Spelman Dance Theater for 5 years and has created many original works for the company. Kathleen 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. 

In addition, Kathleen is a contributing dance writer for ArtsATL and has written for the American edition of Dance Informa and the Atlanta Journal-Constitution. As a founding member of the Atlanta-based contemporary company Staibdance, Kathleen has traveled to Sorrento, Italy as a faculty member on the annual Staibdance Summer Intensive and Stockholm, Sweden for teaching and performance residencies. She has taught at Emory University and Oxford College of Emory, where she served as director of Oxford Dance Company for three years. Her choreography has been presented throughout the Southeast and has been twice selected for American College Dance Association Gala concerts.