Beth Kates is an award-winning, lighting, set, projection, and mixed-reality designer, as well as a digital dramaturg who started her career in rock and roll at the age of 14. Her work has been seen across Canada and around the world. She has collaborated with such notable directors as Jillian Keiley, Peter Hinton, Paul Thompson, Jonathan Christenson, Daniel Brooks, Kim Collier, Ravi Jain, and Jackie Maxwell.

Career highlights include: Between Breaths Orchestral (Artistic Fraud Newfoundland), Silence (The Grand Theatre - London); Vigilante (Catalyst); Bigger Than Jesus (Wyrd), Same Same But Different (Nightswimming); I, Claudia (Crows Theatre); Brimful of Asha (WhyNot / Tarragon); The Last Donnelly Standing, 1837: a Farmers Revolt (The Blyth Festival), Alice in Wonderland, Ragtime, Pygmalion (Shaw).

A leader in new forms of performance creation with emerging digital tools, Beth and Neil Christensen co-created Bury The Wren, an Augmented/Virtual Reality/live (Carbon Reality) performance. She is a member of DoubleEyeStudio, and was the virtual lighting designer for their groundbreaking live VR production Finding PandoraX, and is currently working on another groundbreaking (and secret!) project with them. In 2021, Beth will lead Canada’s first artist residency for VR Performance Creation at Canadian Stage, continue development of Blyth Festival’s Digital Lab and an XR collaboration with Cara Ricketts for the Stratford Festival. She is also co-leading the Blyth Festival’s Young Company to create a full length VR performance work, and is the Co-Curator of the ‘Multiple Realities’ section of World Stage Design 2022.

Beth is a proud member of the Associated Designers of Canada, a charter member of ADC IATSE 659, on the board of Tara Beagan & Andy Moro’s Article 11, and on the steering committee of the PXR conference (Performance and XR). The recipient of two large Digital Strategy Fund Grants, in 2022 Beth will begin work on a massive scale VR Theatre project that will begin the formation of a National VR Theatre Company.

Founder of Playground Studios and Digital Alchemy Creation Lab, she has been an invited presenter at the Prague Quadrennial, Laval VR, and many others. Beth is a four-time nominee for the Siminovitch Prize, and she holds an MFA from the University of Calgary in Drama (with a focus on Computer Science). Her best production to date is her son, Aaron.

www.playgroundstudios.ca

www.bethkates.com