ABOUT: Staff & Board

Kristin Marting, Artistic Director

Kristin Marting is Co-Founder and Artistic Director of HERE and has constructed 24 hybrid works for the stage (10 original works, 8 adaptations of novels and 7 classic plays). Most recently, she premiered Sounding, a live cinema performance loosely inspired by Ibsen’s Lady from the Sea and directed James Scruggs's solo work Disposable Men (winner of an NY Innovative Theatre Award) and his recent new play (RUS)H.

For the last 15 years, she has been developing a unique hybrid directorial / choreographic form that features a "gestural vocabulary" used both as an emotional signifier and as a choreographic element. This vocabulary, though specific to each project, is in a state of constant development with an ever-growing set of permanent gestures being added to the repertoire.

Her work has been supported by the NEA, NYSCA, DCA, Aeroflex Foundation, Axe-Houghton Foundation, Greenwall Foundation, Harkness Foundation for Dance, Jerome Foundation, Rockefeller Foundation Multi Arts Program and Peg Santvoord Foundation; reviews have appeared in all major New York media.

She co-founded Tiny Mythic Theatre Company in 1988 and HERE in 1993. As Artistic Director of HERE, she cultivates artists and programs all events for two performance spaces for an annual audience of 45,000. Under her leadership, HERE has garnered 16 OBIE awards, 2 OBIE grants for artistic achievement, a 2006 Edwin Booth Award (“for Outstanding Contribution to NY Theatre”) from the CUNY Graduate Center, five Drama Desk nominations, two Berrilla Kerr Awards, four NY Innovative Theatre Awards and a Pulitzer Prize nomination. She co-created and co-curates HARP, HERE's Artist Residency Program. For 19 years, she curated The American Living Room, an annual summer festival featuring over 30 new works by emerging artists; and for 8 years, Queer@HERE, an annual festival of gay and lesbian work.

She has lectured and been a guest artist at Bard, Brown, Columbia, Harvard, NYU and Williams. She regularly serves on grant panels for TCG, DCA, NEA and NYSCA, among others. She graduated from New York University in 1988 with honors.
 

Kim Whitener, Producing Director

Kim Whitener joined HERE as Producing Director in February 2007, working in partnership with Artistic Director Kristin Marting to curate and produce all of HERE's activities.

From 2001 until 2007, Ms. Whitener was an independent producer with her own company, KiWi Productions, working with a diverse range of US artists, both companies and individuals, in the contemporary theater, dance-theater, and multi-media worlds to develop and produce new projects, working with co-producers worldwide. Her projects and clients have included The Builders Association's Alladeen, Super Vision and Continuous City, Martha Clarke's The Garden of Earthly Delights remount, several works with Big Dance Theater and 33 Fainting Spells, The Actor's Gang, among others. Ms. Whitener was consulting producer on Logic of the Birds, artist Shirin Neshat's live performance featuring singer Sussan Deyhim (Lincoln Center Festival, Walker Art Center, Artangel London) in 2001. She also was co-producer of Zero Church, a multi-artist concert/performance event by Suzzy and Maggie Roche, at St. Ann's Warehouse in April 2002.

Ms. Whitener was Managing Director of the ensemble theater company The Wooster Group for over four years until Summer 2001, responsible for all tour outreach/producing and management of the organization. Prior to that she served as Marketing Director for Playwrights Horizons for three years (1994-96), with a concentration on developing new audiences for new work in development.

She has served on the NYSCA Individual Artists Panel, the LMCC Swing Space Panel, Tribeca Performing Arts Center Residency panel, and three rounds of the Ensemble Theatre Collaborations Grant Panel administered by Arts Presenters, funded by the Doris Duke Charitable Foundation.

Prior to coming to New York in 1994, Ms. Whitener held several arts administration and producing positions, including Associate Director of Development at the American Music Theater Festival in Philadelphia, and General Manager/Co-Producer of the C. Walsh Theatre/Boston Music Theatre Project at Suffolk University in Boston. She also has extensive experience in teaching seminars nationally and internationally on production, management and development of projects for global touring, most recently in Buenos Aires, sponsored by Indigo Productions, and at the Amsterdam-Maastricht Summer University in The Netherlands, to participants from Western and Central Europe, emphasizing international partnerships in production, touring and funding issues.