ARTISTS

Mad Kate

Berlin (DE)
performance

Kathryn Fischer, aka Mad Kate, is a multifaceted dancer, singer, writer and performance artist from San Francisco.

Combining elements of dance theatre, spoken word, vocals and fashion, she has performed her queer-alien-burlesque-theatre extensively around Europe since moving to Berlin three years ago, seducing audiences with her dynamic stage presence. As a contemporary improvisational dancer Mad Kate integrates techniques from Ballet to Afro-Cuban to Butoh—pioneering a style uniquely her own. As a front woman for the punk-rock-cabaret band Kamikaze Queens, she continues to develop her song writing and vocal signature.

Mad Kate has been featured in Ivan Arrenega’s “Berlin Manners: Burlesque in Berlin,” Jess Feast’s documentary “Cowboys and Communists,” and plays the lead role in Julia Ostertag’s new film, “Saila.”

Kathryn holds an MFA in Writing and Consciousness from the New College of California and a BA in Peace and Conflict Studies with an emphasis in Gender and Sustainable Development from the University of California, Berkeley. Her writing has appeared in Z Magazine, Bitch, Other, Off Our Backs, Art XX, Sex Herald, Tea Party Magazine, Sojourn, Brew City Magazine and Controlled Burn, an anthology of short fiction by New College Press. Her work is currently being featured in the online exhibit, Imagining Ourselves: A Global Generation of Women, a project by the San Francisco International Museum of Women. She self-publishes “The Fabricated Love Affair Art Project,” a feminist, mixed media 'zine.

There will never be enough time to explore all the different women I would like to be. But in each of these personas I inhabit, I find that the through line has been my intellectual and artistic interest in the politics of borders—both between bodies and within bodies. This pursuit has manifested itself in many forms—interviewing women who live in rural farming cooperatives in Nicaragua and Haiti; advocacy of immigrants and political asylum seekers in the Bay Area; teaching creative writing inside the San Francisco Women’s Jail; sex / work / performance art and erotic dance; critical and creative writing; diving off the stage into a crowd of rowdy pogo punks while singing with my band.

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