BIO

Kaitlin Thomas Taylor (She/Her/Hers or They/Them/Theirs) is a director/designer and multi-media artist. She has directed, designed, production managed, and assisted across many Chicago theatres including Redtwist Theatre, TimeLine Theatre, Saint Sebastian Players, Genesis Theatricals, The Music Theatre Company, Otherworld Theatre Company, Public House, Chicago Dramatists, and The Vanguardian Theatre Collective, among others. Kaitlin is currently working as the Director of Member Relations with Red Tape Theatre and as the Production Manager for Waltzing Mechanics.

INSPIRED BY

1) My friends and loved ones and their ability to pursue their goals during difficult times.
2) My friends and loved ones and their ability to be ok with just surviving during difficult times.
3) The online communities that I've found during this pandemic, and their ability to continue to fight despite horrific oppression. Both the ones I belong to and the ones I support through allyship.
This is a very different list that I would have written last year, but this year, for good or for worse has been incredibly transforming to my values.

EXPLORING:

Invisible Identities - As a disabled person with an invisible chronic illness, a bisexual person in a straight - presenting marriage, and a gender fluid person who presents mostly as the gender I was assigned at birth, I live in an odd cross section. I rarely get actively discriminated against on sight, and I have a significant amount of passing privilege, and I am constantly asking myself the question of how much I should disclose and In what situations. I would like to put together a piece exploring this experience, which is one that a lot of people with an invisible identity experience. I have begun to gather some interesting media representations of this experience, and I would possibly like to spend some time interviewing others with similar experiences to possibly incorporate more docudrama elements. I have debated whether this would be more of a one person performance piece - a docudrama in the style often done by my theatre company, Waltzing Mechanics or more an installation piece, which would have a involve a combination of sculpture, video, and audio elements in a found space for exhibition (or maybe a combination of both).

INSPIRATION FOR PROJECT:

The initial idea of creating the piece came after I found an interest in the Showrunner Carina Adly McKenzie, who created the Reboot of Roswell, New Mexico for the CW. Carina, who looks white but whose mother is an Egyptian-American Muslim women, built themes of feeling like you hiding in plain sight into her reboot. I found her journey on that show hit home for me, including the criticism she received (some of which was legitimate, some of which was closer to harassment) and the fact that she stepped down as showrunner after the second season in protest of the network allowing scenes of a show's gay romance to be cut for rerun broadcasting on certain affiliates. It made me realize that while our identities were very different, the experience she had felt very close to mine. And that included the moments when you can unknowingly hurt other minorities because passing privilege sometimes makes you not realize you can also be the oppressor in a lot of scenario's without realizing it. I started to have more conversations with people I knew with similar experiences, and realized how universal the double edged sword of these identities can be.