Kit McKay is a stage director, educator, curator, and producer. Her career as a director has been marked by ensemble-based storytelling and a fixation on reinvigorating the classics. Her two stage productions at the Rose Theatre of Omaha were nominated for 7 OEA awards (winning one), 4 TAG awards (winning one) including Best Direction for Tarzan, The Musical. Kit is known for her role as Artistic Director and co-founder of Parallel 45 Theatre, an organization that brought professional theatre artists to the northern Michigan region. At Parallel 45 Theatre, Kit directed 13 productions, employing over 500 seasonal theatre artists, commissioned multiple new plays, and entertained and provoked thousands of audience members in the northern Michigan region. With P45, she oversaw and/or collaborated on the development of programs such as YouthQuake, The Mitten Lab, The free-to-the-public Reading Series, and the P45 Apprenticeship Program.

Prior to P45, Kit served as a curator and producer for Lumberyard Contemporary Performing Arts in New York, where she helped assist in research and selection of all programs including the Performance Series, Solange MacArthur Award, Future Artists Initiative and Commissioning Program. She developed the Incubator Residency Program, which provided essential support to choreographers and performance artists in the late stage development of their work. At Lumberyard, in her curatorial and programmatic duties she helped herald the works of Doug Elkins, Big Dance Theater, David Neumann, David Dorfman, Yvonne Rainer, Jennifer Tipton, Jack Ferver, Raja Feather Kelly, Wendy Whelan, Okwui Okpokwasili and Zvi Gotheiner among many others.

Kit attended Interlochen Arts Camp in 1994 and graduated from Interlochen Arts Academy, Sarah Lawrence College, and Northwestern University’s Master of Fine Arts directing program where she had the good fortune to cut her teeth assisting on shows at Steppenwolf Theatre, Lookingglass Theatre, and Chicago Shakespeare Theatre among others. She studied at the Yale School of Drama in theatre management and worked as a Yale Fellow at Seattle Repertory Theatre.

Kit had the honor of spending many summers directing the Intermediate Repertory Program, Intermediate Musical Program and now the High School Rep after a hiatus of 12 years. She is currently serving on the drama faculty at Stamford American International School in Singapore where she teaches physical theatre, world puppetry, characterization, mask, melodrama, and devising. She is joined by her husband, Noah Durham Fried (who she met teaching at IAC) and their two children Scout and Ezra.