Kristina "Tina" Satter is an American playwright and theater 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. 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." Her work often deals with subjects of gender, sexual identity, adolescence, and sports.
In 2008, Satter co-founded experimental theatre company Half Straddle, with whom she produces most of her work. Their shows and videos have toured to over 20 countries in the U.S., Europe, Australia, and Asia. She made her Off Broadway debut as a conceiver and director in fall 2019 with Is This a Room at the Vineyard Theatre. Several of her works have been published by 53rd State Press.
Satter wrote and directed the 2023 Peabody Award-winning film Reality, adapted from Is This A Room. It depicts the FBI interrogation of young whistleblower Reality Winner in 2017.
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Personal life and education
Satter is originally from Hopkinton, New Hampshire. 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. In 2007, Satter moved to Brooklyn, where she now resides, and attended Brooklyn College's M.F.A. playwriting program run by Mac Wellman.
Awards
Tina Satter won a Foundation for Contemporary Arts Grants to Artists award (2016), and a Doris Doris Duke Artist Impact Award in 2014. In 2019, she received a Pew Fellowship. Satter also received a Guggenheim Fellowship in 2020.
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; Drama Desk Award for Unique Theatrical Experience; an Obie and a Lucille Lortel Award for Emily Davis's performance as Reality Winner; and an Outer Critics Circle Award for sound designers Sanae Yamada and Lee Kinney.
Satter's film Reality, an adaptation of Is This A Room, won a 2023 Peabody Award for "challenging viewers with a gripping dramatization of real-life events that eschews traditional attempts to explain personal and political motivations, and encouraging us to find in such frictions the very essence of storytelling in a post-truth era."
Works
Is This a Room is a verbatim theatre 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, and went on to an extended, critically acclaimed Off Broadway run at the Vineyard Theatre in fall 2019. The show has been called a "blistering piece of political theater" by Artforum. 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.
Ghost Rings is a song cycle mirroring Satter's real-life relationship with her estranged sister against a fictional tale of a woman impregnating her childhood friend. It premiered in April 2016 at New York Live Arts and featured Chris Giarmo, Erin Markey, Kristen Sieh, and Tina. It was re-mounted in New York City at the American Realness festival in January 2017. 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."
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. 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."
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. The original cast included Jess Barbagallo, Elizabeth DeMent, Jim Fletcher, and Paul Pontrelli. The show originally premiered at Abrons Art Center in 2013, and then was part of PS122's COIL Festival in January 2014. The show was nominated for a 2014 ZKB Patronage Prize at the Theater Spektakel (Zurich).
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. Erin Markey joined the touring cast.
