Kristin Marting

Director / Artistic Director of HERE
New York, New York USA

Where do you look for inspiration?
All around this awesome city every day.

What’s your favorite cocktail?
A glass of Argentinian Malbec

What play or production changed your life?
The Seven Deadly Sins – Pina Bausch

I feel most like myself when I am directing. In rehearsal, I fuse all of my different strengths together into a creative force. I love the rich and evolving collaborative process with the performers, designers and writers and uncovering the patterns that will get us where we need to go.

What is your best escape?
Going to the farmer’s market on Saturday morning, seeing what deliciousness all my farmer friends have brought and cooking up an exciting gourmet lunch for my family

What’s the one thing nobody knows about you?
I used to be a DJ here in NYC in lower east side clubs.

Kristin Marting is a director of hybrid work. Over the last 20 years, she has constructed 26 works for the stage. She is a co-founder and Artistic Director of HERE, where she cultivates artists and programs all events – including 17 OBIE-award winners—for an annual audience of 30,000.

Katie Pearl

Performance Maker, Director
New Orleans, Louisiana; heading to Providence, Rhode Island soon, USA

Recent inspiring thing:  “Say what you mean, literally and in all other senses.” Carlos Fuentes was paraphrasing Rimbaud when he said this, in a beautiful essay he wrote about his own relationship to language, and his language’s relationship to his creative identity. In Fuente’s opinion, language constructs culture, and cultures grows and deepens through contact with conflicting ideas. Isolation leads to death. I like thinking about this in terms of a creative culture. That’s why it’s so important to see things, to read things, to go to workshops. Not to “get ideas”, but to give your own ideas something to grow against. Staying in contact gives your individual identity a stronger, deeper language, and a strong, deep language allows you to say what you mean, literally and in all other senses.

My guilty pleasure: has and always will be reading pop culture trash magazines while waiting at the airport or standing in line at the grocery store.

The production that changed my life: Pina Bausch’s Nelken, seen at the Edinburgh festival when I was 24. I saw it two nights in a row.

Katie Pearl authors alternative, often site-specific performance and develops works for theater with playwrights and artists around the U.S. Katie is co-artistic director of PearlDamour, an OBIE Award- winning interdisciplinary performance company with long-term creative partner Lisa D’Amour. Katie regularly teaches at various universities, and has a small life coaching practice. www.pearldamour.com, www.katiepearlcoaching.com

Orietta Crispino

Director, Performer, Artistic Director
New York, New York USA

* Where do you look for inspiration?  Mostly life, dreams and books.

* What’s your favorite book / movie / line from a play / pop culture guilty pleasure / cocktail?  Barry Lyndon, any Cronenberg. I am not a cocktail kind of gal, but lately I have been enjoying Margaritas!!!

* What play or production changed your life? Einstein on the beach (Bob Wilson), Café Muller (Pina Bausch), La Vita che ti diedi (Pirandello/Castri), Kinkan Shonen (Sankai Juku).

* Is there anything you still dream of doing?  Playing the cello. King Lear (playing the king!).

* What’s the one thing nobody knows about you? I can fall asleep stroking my ears.

Orietta Crispino born in Italy, is a graduate of the prestigious “Piccolo Teatro” School in Milan, where she worked with the major Italian directors Strehler and Castri. She taught acting and directing there. She is co-founder and artistic director of Theaterlab in NYC. Her most recent production is Three Sisters Come and Go.