Tina Satter

Kristina "Tina" Satter (born 1974) is an American filmmaker, playwright, and director based in New York City. She is the founder and artistic director of the theater company Half Straddle, which formed in 2008 and received an Obie Award grant in 2013.[1] Satter won a Guggenheim in 2020.[2] Satter was described by Ben Brantley of the New York Times as "a genre-and-gender-bending, visually exacting stage artist who has developed an ardent following among downtown aesthetes with a taste for acidic eye candy and erotic enigmas."[3] Her work often deals with subjects of gender, sexual identity, adolescence, and sports.[4][5]

Tina Satter
Farahani at the 2023 Berlin International Film Festival
Born
Hopkinton, New Hampshire
Occupation(s)Playwright, theater director
Years active2008–present
WebsiteHalfstraddle.com

She won a Foundation for Contemporary Arts Grants to Artists award (2016),[6] and a Doris Doris Duke Artist Impact Award in 2014. In 2019, she received a Pew Fellowship.[7] Satter has created 10 shows with Half Straddle, and the company's shows and videos have toured to over 20 countries in the U.S., Europe, Australia, and Asia.[8] She made her Off Broadway debut as a conceiver and director in fall 2019 with Is This a Room at the Vineyard Theatre.[9] A collection of three of her plays, Seagull (Thinking of You), with Away Uniform and Family was published in 2014.[10] The text for her show Ghost Rings was published in 2017 by 53rd State Press along with a vinyl album of the show's songs.[11]

Biography

Satter is originally from Hopkinton, New Hampshire.[12] She attended Bowdoin College in Brunswick, Maine where she received a B.A. in English and Reed College in Portland, Oregon, where she received a M.A. in Liberal Studies.[13] In 2007, Satter moved to Brooklyn, where she now resides, and attended Brooklyn College's M.F.A. playwriting program run by Mac Wellman.[14]

Awards

Tina Satter won a Guggenheim Fellowship in 2020.[15] Her show Is This A Room was nominated for a number of awards in 2020 and received the following: Obie Award Special Citation for Concept and Direction for Tina Satter;[16] the show won a Drama Desk Award for Unique Theatrical Experience;[17] Emily Davis who portrayed Reality Winner in the piece won an Obie for Performance and a Lucille Lortel Award; and sound designers Sanae Yamada and Lee Kinney won an Outer Critics Circle Award.

Works

IS THIS A ROOM: Reality Winner Verbatim Transcription is the word-for-word staging of the June 2017 interrogation of the young American whistleblower Reality Winner. The show premiered at The Kitchen in New York City in January 2019,[18] and went on to an extended, critically acclaimed Off Broadway run at the Vineyard Theatre in fall 2019.[19] The show has been called a "blistering piece of political theater" by Artforum.[20] The cast includes Pete Simpson, TL Thompson, Becca Blackwell, and Emily Davis.

Here I Go, pt. 2 of You was a lecture series organized at The Kitchen in March 2017 and featured lectures by artists including Sarah Schulman, Heidi Hahn, Branden Jacob-Jenkins, Claudia Rankine, Ariel Goldberg and others.[21]

Ghost Rings is a play conceived of as feminist pop/punk show described in its New York Times review as "fantastical, odd and sometimes so tender it's raw, 'Ghost Rings' is a pop concert with a drama inside.[22]" Ghost Rings premiered in April 2016 at New York Live Arts and featured Chris Giarmo, Erin Markey, Kristen Sieh, and Tina.[23] It was re-mounted in New York City at the American Realness festival in January 2017.[24] Culturebot wrote about the show "Satter’s women fantasize about procreation without men, about holding a piece of another woman in their bodies. In language that is revelatory through its very strangeness, Satter echoes this desire."[25]

Ancient Lives opened in January 2015 at The Kitchen, and centers around a group of young women who go with their teacher into the woods where she leads them in setting up an alternative feminist community and television show and they come under the spell of a witch/warlock.[26] Artforum wrote: "There is a strikingly synthetic quality to Tina Satter's seductive and mesmerizing 'Ancient Lives,' a play that entwines adolescence and obsolescence in order to un-tell a familiar story."[27]

House of Dance was a collaboration with Richard Maxwell's New York City Players, and it portrays an hour in the lives of four people searching for intimacy in a small town tap dance studio.[28] The original cast included Jess Barbagallo, Elizabeth DeMent, Jim Fletcher, and Paul Pontrelli.[29] The show originally premiered at Abrons Art Center in 2013, and then was part of PS122's COIL Festival in January 2014.[30] The show was nominated for a 2014 ZKB Patronage Prize at the Theater Spektakel (Zurich).[31]

Seagull (Thinking of you) was a re-imagining of Anton Chekhov's The Seagull. This production premiered in PS122's COIL festival in New York City in 2013. The original cast included Jess Barbagallo, Eliza Bent, Becca Blackwell, Emily Davis, Julia Sirna-Frest, and Susie Sokol.[32] Erin Markey joined the touring cast.

Away Uniform Two young women live far away from everyone they know with a mysterious man, and create a sense of home by re-enacting memories of field hockey drills and made-up rituals. It opened in 2012 at Incubator Arts Project and starred Jess Barbagallo, Emily Davis and Pete Simpson.[33]

In The Pony Palace/FOOTBALL, a female and transgender cast portrays a high school football team.[34] It opened at the Bushwick Starr in 2011. L Magazine wrote "The outsized and peculiar emotions of both high school and sports are brought to bear on this stylized field."[35]

Other works include Nurses in New England from 2010, Family from 2009, and The Knockout Blow from 2008.

Filmography

As director
Features
Year Title Director Writer Producer Distributor
2023 Reality Yes Yes No HBO Films

As herself
Year Title Role Notes
2022 Late Night with Seth Meyers Self Episode: Late Night Lit: Toby Marlow & Lucy Moss - Tina Satter

References
  1. "2013 | Obie Awards". Obie Awards. Retrieved 2017-12-14.
  2. "Q&A with Guggenheim Fellow Tina Satter". Theater and Dance. Retrieved 2021-04-22.
  3. Brantley, Ben (2015). "Tina Satter's 'Ancient Lives' Is at the Kitchen". The New York Times. ISSN 0362-4331. Retrieved 2017-12-14.
  4. "Interview: Tina Satter - Girlhood, Adolescence and Framing Intangible Moments". Contemporary Performance. 2016-03-31. Retrieved 2017-12-14.
  5. Soloski, Alexis (2015). "Tina Satter Readies the Stage for 'Ancient Lives'". The New York Times. ISSN 0362-4331. Retrieved 2017-12-14.
  6. "Tina Satter :: Foundation for Contemporary Arts". www.foundationforcontemporaryarts.org. Retrieved 2017-12-14.
  7. "Pew Center for Arts & Heritage Awards $8.4 Million to Philadelphia's Cultural Sector". www.artforum.com. 21 October 2019. Retrieved 2019-11-23.
  8. "Tina Satter Talks Half Straddle and Ghost Rings". pastemagazine.com. Retrieved 2018-02-02.
  9. "Vineyard Theatre Announces New Works by Tina Satter & Antoinette Nwandu". Broadway.com. Retrieved 2019-11-23.
  10. "TINA SATTER: INTERVIEW | B O D Y". bodyliterature.com. 9 January 2014. Retrieved 2017-12-14.
  11. "Tina Satter Talks Half Straddle and Ghost Rings". pastemagazine.com. 2017-01-09. Retrieved 2019-11-23.
  12. Szymkowicz, Adam (2013-10-25). "Adam Szymkowicz: I Interview Playwrights Part 612: Tina Satter". Adam Szymkowicz. Retrieved 2017-12-15.
  13. Barton, Randall S. (October 30, 2013). "Tina Satter (Thinking of You)". Reed Magazine.
  14. Soloski, Alexis (February 17, 2015). "Mac Wellman, a Playwriting Mentor Whose Only Mantra Is Oddity". The New York Times.
  15. "Sanford Biggers and Zoe Leonard Among 2020 Guggenheim Fellows". www.artforum.com. 9 April 2020. Retrieved 2020-09-20.
  16. Considine, Allison (2020-07-16). "The 2020 Obie Awards Bring Magic Home". AMERICAN THEATRE. Retrieved 2020-09-20.
  17. "'The Inheritance,' 'Strange Loop,' 'Moulin Rouge' Among Drama Desk Award Winners". Variety. 2020-06-14. Retrieved 2020-09-20.
  18. Hess, Amanda (2018-12-30). "Staging Reality Winner: An F.B.I. Transcript Becomes an Offbeat Thriller". The New York Times. ISSN 0362-4331. Retrieved 2019-11-23.
  19. Brantley, Ben (2019-10-24). "'Is This a Room' Review: Why'd She Blow the Whistle?". The New York Times. ISSN 0362-4331. Retrieved 2019-11-23.
  20. "Helen Shaw on Tina Satter/Half Straddle's Is This A Room: REALITY WINNER VERBATIM TRANSCRIPTION". www.artforum.com. 24 January 2019. Retrieved 2019-11-23.
  21. "The Kitchen Presents Half Straddle's HERE I GO, PT. 2 OF YOU Tonight". BroadwayWorld.com. Retrieved 2017-12-18.
  22. Collins-Hughes, Laura (25 April 2016). "Review: Tina Satter's 'Ghost Rings,' an Elliptical Tale of Lost Connections". The New York Times. Retrieved 2017-12-15.
  23. "New York Live Arts to Present Half Straddle's GHOST RINGS". BroadwayWorld.com. Retrieved 2017-12-14.
  24. "Tina Satter Talks Half Straddle and Ghost Rings". pastemagazine.com. Retrieved 2017-12-14.
  25. "The Funks". Culturebot. 2016-05-14. Retrieved 2017-12-15.
  26. Brantley, Ben (January 12, 2015). "Plunging Teenage Angst Deeper Into the Woods". The New York Times.
  27. Krasinski, Jennifer. "Jennifer Krasinski on Tina Satter's Ancient Lives and the COIL Festival". artforum.com. Retrieved 2017-12-15.
  28. Brantley, Ben (October 27, 2013). "A Tap-Dancer in Training With Hopes as High as Falling Stars". The New York Times.
  29. "New York City Players to Premiere Tina Satter's HOUSE OF DANCE at Abrons, 10/23-11/9". BroadwayWorld.com. Retrieved 2017-12-15.
  30. Als, Hilton (2013-12-30). "Getting Personal". The New Yorker. ISSN 0028-792X. Retrieved 2017-12-15.
  31. "Half Straddle to Host ANCIENT LIVES Benefit Gala at The Kitchen, 10/5". BroadwayWorld.com. Retrieved 2018-02-02.
  32. "'Seagull (Thinking of you)' Flooded With Theatrical Imagination". Backstage.com. Retrieved 2017-12-15.
  33. "Half Straddle and the Incubator Arts Project Present AWAY UNIFORM". BroadwayWorld.com. Retrieved 2017-12-18.
  34. Zinoman, Jason (February 16, 2011). "Gender Blitz on a High School Gridiron". The New York Times.
  35. "Half Straddle Touches Down With In The Pony Palace/FOOTBALL - The L Magazine". www.thelmagazine.com. 16 February 2011. Retrieved 2017-12-18.
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