THEATRE PRACTITIONER + HELPER

Katey Wattam is a director, creator, and helper of mixed English, Irish, and Anishinaabe ancestry. She has worked with many communities across Turtle Island, and each one holds a bit of her heart. She is drawn to stories that connect with her ways of knowing while allowing space to explore and experiment with theatrical forms through a mixed-blood/Indigenous lens. Through her corporeal-based practice, she is guided by her own blood memory and how it attunes with others to uncover ancestral knowledge to reclaim and decolonize bodies, minds, and spaces. 

As a researcher her work centralized around Indigenizing and decolonizing medical practices through game & arts-based methodologies. At the heart of her research lay a process of co-learning and co-knowledge production in cross-cultural contexts. She has an intimate knowledge of institutions, the challenges faced by Indigenous folks within them, and the strength(s) of Indigenous-led community-building, education, and healing practices.

She is an alum of McGill University, MAI Alliance Program, Black Theatre Workshop's Artist Mentorship Program, and Why Not Theatre's ThisGen Fellowship. Katey is currently developing a theatrical adaptation of Katherena Vermette's poetry book, river woman, just completing a residency as part of the Indigenous Playwrights Nest at the Banff Centre. As an artist-researcher, she is working with Project Humanity, exploring ethics of care and somatic abolitionism in relation to verbatim theatre.  

Born and raised in Tkaronto, she currently lives in Tio'tiá: ke / Mooniyaang and is pursuing her Master's in Indigenous Trauma and Resiliency at the Factor-Inwentash Faculty of Social Work at the University of Toronto.