Kathy Randels, a native New Orleanian, is a theatre artist/educator and the founding artistic director of ArtSpot Productions. She studied, lived and worked in Chicago from 1987-1994, receiving a Bachelor of Science in Performance Studies in 1991 from Northwestern University. Randels has written, performed in, and directed numerous original solo and collaborative theatre works for professional, prison and student ensembles; her pieces have toured throughout the world. In 2007, she partnered with neighborhood recovery organizers HOME, New Orleans? on Lakeviews, a community ritual for her family’s flooded neighborhood. It was during this time she created Coming Forward, a piece with eight members of her father’s church congregation, as well as Spaces In Between. Past collaborations include three pieces with Dah Teatar of Belgrade, Serbia from 1997-2003, of which her most notable work was Maps Of Forbidden Remembrance, produced with theater company 7 Stages from Atlanta. Randels directs ongoing community-building-through-the-arts projects with the Drama Club at the Louisiana Correctional Institute for Women which she founded in 1996 and the Students at the Center program in the New Orleans public schools.

“The joy of site-specific performance work is finding physical gestures and movements that accompany the landscape, learning about the history of the land itself, its stories, the stories of the people who have inhabited the land, and how those two are interconnected.” – Kathy Randels