Kara Strait is a New York-based director, livestreamer, and podcaster. A graduate of Columbia University and The New School for Drama's MFA program, Kara’s work focuses on curating and exploring queer spaces, interrogating the way power operates in our society, and bringing visceral and immediate stories to audiences in New York and around the world.
In 2016, Kara founded Torn Out Theater, along with Alice Mottola and Diana Levy. The company produces and promotes theatrical productions that inspire and challenge audiences to explore the questions of modern sexuality, gender, and body politics. Her first production with Torn Out was an all-woman production of The Tempest, in which the actors performed partially or completely nude. Performed in Central and Prospect Parks in NYC, The Tempest embraced themes of freedom, restriction, identity, and transformation to tell one of Shakespeare's final stories while also making a bold statement about public body freedom. The production The two outdoor performances drew crowds of almost four hundred audience members and garnered coverage from NBC News, The Guardian, Salon, and many others.
Since 2016, Kara and Torn Out have continued to use classic texts, along with nudity in public parks, to challenge the way we see our bodies. 2017’s all-male Hamlet wrestled with the confused, often-violent reactions to the naked male body. 2018’s The Rover explored the tenuous boundary between sexual and non-sexual nudity. Most recently, Antigonick (directed by Torn Out’s Associate Artistic Director, Britt Berke) confronted an audience in the midst of a pandemic with the immediacy of touch and the essential dignity of our physical bodies.
In addition to her theater work, Kara hosts a live show on her Twitch channel four nights a week, where she engages with an international, primarily queer audience through discussion, art, and gameplay. Since the initial outbreak of COVID-19 in the US, her twitch stream has become a way to continue reaching audiences and doing vital work through a fully online medium.
Her other work includes The Film Reroll podcast, a collaborative performance in which she and her castmates reinvent classic films by turning them into role-playing games, where the choices of screenwriters and directors can be upturned in a moment by a single dice roll.