Mad Kate

About me:

Kathryn Fischer (aka Mad Kate) is a writer and performance artist living in Berlin, Germany with her partner and performance accomplice Juan Chamié. 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 five years ago. As a contemporary improvisational dancer Mad Kate integrates techniques from Ballet to Afro-Cuban to Butoh, pioneering a style uniquely her own. She is front woman for the punk-rock-cabaret band Kamikaze Queens and a proud member of the Bonaparte circus. Mad Kate's performance work has been featured in several documentaries and films, including Emilie Jouvet's Too Much Pussy: Feminist Sluts in the Queer X Team, Cheryl Dunye's Mommy is Coming, Ivan Arrenega's Berlin Manners: Burlesque in Berlin, and Jess Feast's documentary Cowboys and Communists. She also plays the lead role in Julia Ostertag's film, Saila. Mad Kate can often be found at the clothing design store and performance space, EXIT. 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, ExBerliner, SexHerald, Exodus, Sojourn, Sexflies: R rated stories 4 the uncanny, Tea Party Magazine, 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 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--whether it be 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; or diving off the stage into a crowd of rowdy pogo punks while singing with my band.