Catherine McKinnon
Catherine McKinnon studied to be a writer and director at Flinders University Drama Centre. Over a nine-year period she worked for the Red Shed Theatre as a writer, director, dramaturg, and co-artistic coordinator developing, with colleagues, numerous new Australian plays. Her own plays produced at the Shed are Immaculate Deceptions, A Rose By Any Other Name, Road to Mindanao, and Eye of Another. During this time she also directed plays for the State Theatre Company of SA. Her directing credits there include Diving For Pearls and Barmaids, by Katherine Thompson, Three Birds Alighting On A Field, by Timberlake Wertenbaker, Spring Awakening by Frank Wedekind, and Morning Sacrifice by Dymphna Cusack. After leaving Adelaide she completed a Masters in Creative Writing at UTS. In 2006 she won the Penguin Women’s Weekly Award for her short story Haley and the Sea. In 2008 Penguin Viking published her novel, The Nearly Happy Family. Her play Tilt was selected for the 2010 National Playwriting Festival in Brisbane and the High Tide Genesis workshop in London in 2011. As I Lay Dreaming was a finalist in the Seaborne Award, had a reading at Parnassus Den in 2010 and won the Mitch Mathews Award. She has a practice-led PhD from Flinders University and currently lectures in performance and theatre-making at the University of Wollongong, while finishing work on, Storyland, a novel set in the Illawarra, New South Wales, and two plays, As I Lay Dreaming and Hurt.