Kate is an active researcher and scholar. She holds a Bachelor of Arts (Honours Performance Studies) and a Graduate Diploma of Movement and Dance from the University of Melbourne. Kate was the recipient of a Vice Chancellors Postgraduate Research Award in 2009, enabling her to undertake a PhD in Performance Studies at Victoria University, where she explored the relationship between memory, neuroscience and performance-making. Her published work has appeared in journals and books, and she travels and speaks about her research at conferences nationally and internationally. She is currently Lecturer in Creative Practice (Art and Performance) at Deakin University.

About

Dr Kate Hunter is an actor,  performance-maker and researcher who makes cross-disciplinary and immersive work that is stimulated by investigations into cognitive neuroscience, the body, the senses, diseases and dying, autobiography, talking to herself, sadness, and the strange territory of memory. Her work juxtaposes digital and analog technology, storytelling and the live body, and employs innovative use of verbatim recordings to examine the complex interplay between hearing, listening, reading and speaking that is implicit in the ways humans communicate through language. Kate is interested in relationships between the brain and the body, embodied cognition and its relevance to physical theatre trainings and improvisation.

Kate’s new work about immortality, In Perpetuity, was supported in 2017 through an Art in Biomedical Science residency at the Harry Brookes Museum of Anatomy and Pathology.

Kate is a core artist with Tashmadada contemporary performance company, and Associate Artist with award-winning physical theatre company Born in a Taxi. Tashmadada projects include ’The Procrastination Project’ (La Mama 2015, Performance Studies International 2016), ‘The Dead Twin’ development in Melbourne in 2014 and ‘In Persistence of Memory’ in New York in 2015 with choreographer Melissa Riker and the Kinesis Project. In 2010 Kate co-created Born in a Taxi’s ‘The Waiting Room’ (winner Brisbane Powerhouse Award) which toured to the World Theatre Festival in 2011, and saw a return season at The Substation in 2013. In 2011 Kate created ‘Maybe we’re never together’ at Big West with writer Emilie Collyer, and in 2013 she joined with video/sound artist Catherine Clover to make ‘B is for Bird’, a sound art performance about pigeons, crows and seagulls, for Australia’s leading festival of sound art, Liquid Architecture.

Kate has trained extensively in the Suzuki Method of Actor Training, Viewpoints and Composition. She has studied in New York with Anne Bogart and SITI Company, the UK with Ruth Kanner and Andrew Morrish, and with acclaimed theatre director Richard Schechner. She is a founding member of Suzuki Melbourne, a peer training group committed to regular practice and interrogation of the Suzuki Method of Actor Training.